I came back to painting more calmly
I Returned to Painting More Quietly
I am no longer trying to achieve anything. I am trying, rather, to recover something.
When I returned to painting after almost thirty years, I no longer felt the need to prove anything to myself or to anyone else.
The first time around, painting belonged to the beginning of things — a time of choices, ambition and searching for my own place. Later, life took me elsewhere. For many years I worked in design and craftsmanship, ran a business and dealt with things far removed from the quiet act of standing in front of a canvas.
When I began painting again in 2023, I realised that I was returning to it differently.
I was no longer interested in whether a painting should look a certain way. I was not trying to fit into a movement, a fashion or an audience’s expectations. What became more important was the act of looking itself, touching the material, observing colour and watching what happens to the surface under my hand.
That is probably the greatest difference.
Today I can leave something unresolved. I can allow part of a painting to remain rough, uneven or ambiguous. Not everything has to be ordered simply because I would know how to order it.
Over time, I have also become increasingly interested in the material substance of the painting itself. Paint is not merely a carrier of colour for me. It has thickness, weight, an edge and a shadow. It can be cut into, rubbed away, stripped back to reveal earlier layers and then covered again. A painting is created not only by adding, but also by preserving traces of what happened before.
Perhaps that is why the word “return” feels right to me.
I am not starting from the beginning.
I am returning with all the time that has passed in between. With the experience of my hands, the memory of earlier paintings, work with other materials, places, people and everything I could not yet have possessed thirty years ago.
I am not trying to recover my youth or paint what I might have painted then.
I want to see what I can paint now.
That is why I returned to painting more quietly.
Not to gain something, but to recover something that, throughout all those years, had remained somewhere within me.
