Later On - Nearby
Artist’s Statement
In my mid fifties, as so many do, I faced a number of challenges and life-changing events, the most significant of which was the dissolution of my marriage.
The self portrait in this show, Stripped, is an expression of how it felt to be so utterly stripped down at that time. The painting was a kind of self-therapy which helped me absorb what was happening, as was the almost involuntary decision to shave my head. When I finally decided to take off my wedding band I had to cut it because it would not come over the calloused knuckle. The two pieces of the ring now hang from the stretcher below my ring finger.
Room for One, the interior painted at the same time, is an expression of the new reality of being on my own as well as my openness to including another at the centre of my life.
These years later, I am deeply grateful for the one with whom I now entrust my heart - it was very easy to make room for her. In planning for this exhibition my first decision was to include a portrait of Ruth.
Taken together, these three pieces make a kind of soulful triptych of change and renewal.
There is very little unique in my life - quite the opposite. Most lives follow a similar trajectory. In the first half of life we leave home, set goals and work toward them, find a life partner and raise a family, establish a career and focus on success. Then, inevitably, and usually because of some trauma or failure for which we are quite unprepared, everything shifts.
The years bracketed by that triptych have been for me a crossing over into later life with all the adjustments that has required. Within that time, as well as being remarried, I have retired, lost both parents and grieved the loss of a still-born first grandchild before the joy of four new arrivals. All of that has brought me to a new place.
There has been no physical move involved. The new place is interior; a state of mind and a renewed and deeper appreciation for old surroundings and the things that have been nearby all along.
As the broken pieces of coloured glass in a kaleidoscope shift and tumble to make a new and unexpectedly more beautiful pattern, so this new place is more than I could have hoped for.
The paintings here are either an expression of that shift and tumble or a celebration of that new pattern.
[All of the paintings in this show, along with the texts which were posted with them, are together in one of the gallery pages on this site.]