Painting is often intuitive for me. It acts as a mirror — capturing emotions and sensations as they are, even when I already have some awareness of them. The act of painting helps me acknowledge where I’m at. Sometimes I think or talk through the work afterwards, and that reflection can be useful. But more than anything, it’s the process itself that matters.
Unless I’m sharing this process, these words are silently integrated. That’s the extraordinary power I have experienced through art making.
These two watercolours on paper were made earlier this month, five days apart. Most of the time I don’t write about what I paint, but I’m sharing these words to give you a sense of the process and how shapes and colour can offer reflections.
The first painting explores the push, pull, and pause of relationship energy. The second reflects “wintering” — integration after Qi Gong, a softer inward settling. The first contains more lines. The second contains more breath. Both are emotional states, not identities. Just different. Moving through something… shifting.
The lines in the first piece wrap around each other without fully merging. There is contact, but not fusion. Movement, but also interruption. A “pause” lives in the slight containment of the shapes. Energy wanting to move, yet checking itself. Its vertical orientation feels structured. Lines wrap and layer around a central axis, creating a sense of tension and internal motion as the energy gathers inward, with forms pressing against each other but not fully resolving. It feels concentrated, held, and in process.
The second shifts into a more horizontal flow. The structure softens, edges dissolve, and the paint moves more freely across the surface. There is less containment and more atmosphere. The energy disperses rather than gathers, suggesting release, integration, and settling.
The geometry has softened into gesture. It breathes outward instead of coiling inward. It feels like exhalation.
The dark pools are not conflict; they are sediment. Integration. Nutrient returning to soil. Where the first emphasises line and direction, the second emphasises space and diffusion.One feels compressed and focused. The other feels expanded and open.
Neither is me or feels more like me, because I am not either state. I am aware that I moved through both. I expressed contraction and integration without clinging to either as identity.
