Blog

I'm inspired to write today because a friend wrote about one of my paintings:

"I chose to write about Confinement series no.3. I let myself go a little in writing what I did and have probably read all sorts of things into your painting which you did not intend. But I felt a very strong emotional pull to this piece of work....  I went for a walk and came back to find your picture. It was so ... visceral and interesting to get lost in.  I wrote it relatively quickly and tried to avoid the temptation to self-censor." (And now, story begins....)

"As if I were about to fall into a whirlpool, my attention is quickly lured by the smoothness and circular movement which drags my gaze, inevitably, into the depths.  

 

I wanted to linger on the smoothness, the seductive curves, of those cold, blue rose petals, but I had no choice… I can feel myself falling into that black hole despite all my efforts to resist.

 

And I am not the first to fall, judging by the white scratching and scrabbling marks of those that have gone - disappeared - before me.  They must mark the desperate attempts of others to resist the descent into that void. But there is nothing to be done…  See how the marks multiply as the speed of descent increases towards the abyss in the centre of the painting, where there is no possibility of anything other than a bone-chilling loneliness (or worse)? 

 

We become the mad, foaming playthings of the vortex as it sweeps us, to a place we don’t want to go.  Whatever awaits us there (and there is no way of knowing) we have no choice but to accept it as our fate. 

 

But if the painting takes me on a physical journey into and beyond confinement, it also makes sure that I know why I am being taken to this awful place…   The pandemic is written large over the painting.  I can see it in the unforgiving blue, black and white, in the starkness of these colours and in their strangeness, The forms may masquerade as an oddly coloured rose, but they reject any sense of safety or comfort. No, this is something alien, something which defies our attempts to understand or tame it.  

 

I feel as if I should be protected and cocooned, but instead, and far sooner than I wanted, I am being taken into this black, unknown heart where I have no knowledge of what is happening to me, nor why." 

 

To all of you, thank you for allowing yourself to be carried away and into my work!

Now, I want to paint more, hoping to inspire some more powerful super-short stories like the one above.

 

Vicki