January Studio Notes
January studio notes
January Studio Notes: Wolf Moon and the Art of Reduction
Last night was the Wolf Moon the first full moon of the year. Even through the haze of my first winter cold, I found myself awake early, drawn to the strength of its light purhaps. Shadows stretched across the room with a kind of Monochromatic magic, reminding me of the quiet power that illumination and darkness share. That moment carried me back into the studio with a renewed sense of purpose to continue with my reduced palettes stripping away excess until only what matters remains.
Today I opened the largest of my sketchbooks, letting myself work with freedom. After the long Christmas break, I know it will take a few days to find rhythm again, but there is a gift in that pause. At the end of last year, I felt the pressure of rushing to finish paintings, of pushing too hard against time.
There is a vein in painting that lies between urgency and necessity between rushing and simply placing down what must be there. To communicate with darkness, to let shadow speak, is to reduce by necessity. It is not about withholding, but about allowing the essential to emerge.
The Wolf Moon has reminded me beginnings are not about abundance but about clarity. In the studio I will carry this lesson forward to paint only what needs to be said, and to trust that the silence around it will speak just as loudly.
January Studio Notes: Frequencies and the Ocean’s Patterns
When I’m painting, I find myself tracing the hidden geometries of nature her infinite, changing mathematics. The branching of trees, the spirals of shells, the shifting rhythm of clouds, each carries a frequency, a pulse that feels both ancient and alive.
Water deepens this meditation. The ocean’s surface is never still, yet within its waves there is a rhythm that speaks of constancy. Currents, tides, and ripples form patterns that echo the unseen mathematics. To follow these movements with the brush is to listen to nature’s invisible language a language of repetition and variation, of rise and fall.
It is in focusing on these frequencies that I feel most calm. The act of tuning into them quiets the noise of the day, drawing me into a space where brush and mind move together. Painting becomes less about representation and more about resonance about sensing the invisible structures that hold the world together.
Ocean patterns remind me that movement itself is a kind of safety. The ebb and flow, the endless return, the hidden mathematics beneath the surface these are the contexts in which I feel secure as I tune into them I find calm in the knowledge that nature’s invisible patterns are always present, surrounding me and reminding me to trust the rhythm of change.
January Studio Notes: Texture, Depth, and Winter Roots
This month in the studio, I find myself craving more texture in my paintings a move away from the flat surface toward something heavier, more tactile. I want the paint itself to become rock, sand, tree. To carry weight. To hold depth. To let light find its contrast against the ridges and valleys of pigment.
It feels like a pool between sensation and form the brush searching not only for image but for substance, for the material presence of paint as matter. Texture as a way of grounding vision, of making the invisible mathematics of nature tangible.
Yet January has not been easy. A heavy cold has interrupted my sleep, and with it my energy, my clarity of thought, and the rhythm of time spent consistently in the studio. Illness reminds me how fragile the creative cycle can be, how easily momentum falters when the body demands rest.
January Studio Notes: Evocation suggesting rather than depicting.
Phenomenological painting, engaging with perception itself, painting not the object but the experience of it.
Poetic abstraction where the canvas becomes a vessel for emotion, rhythm, and resonance rather than representation.
Sublime expression capturing what overwhelms or transcends the senses, the unseen forces behind nature.
Metaphoric image‑making painting as a metaphor for inner states, invisible structures, or hidden worlds.
Some artists simply call it painting the unseen or rendering resonance giving form to frequencies, atmospheres, or emotions that can’t be measured but can be felt.
January Studio Notes: Painting Toward the Divine
In the studio this month, I find myself painting not just what can be seen, but reaching for something beyond sight. Each brushstroke feels like a devotional act, a way of searching for my own form of the divine. The paint becomes more than colour it becomes matter, weight, texture, presence.
I’m not trying to capture an image so much as to invite a resonance, a shimmer that rises when paint and spirit meet. Rock, sand, tree, ocean they shift beneath the brush into vessels for light, carriers of something unseen. In those moments, painting feels like prayer, a ritual of listening.
There is a yearning in this practice, a desire to be touched a different personal spiritually through the act of making. The studio a place of invocation. I am searching for the invisible patterns that hold the world together, and in tracing them, I find both offering and surrender.
This is where my art feels most alive in the tension between the seen and the unseen, between the weight of paint and the light it releases. It is here, in this devotional search, that I glimpse the sacred ground of my inner connection to the scared.
January Studio Notes: The Gift of Time in the Alps
Time in the Alps is a gift given in silence and in scale. Days spent painting among the mountains are not simply hours marked on a clock, but a widening of perception, a deepening of breath. The ridges and valleys hold you in their immensity, and each brushstroke feels like a small act of homage to the vastness around you.
Yet the mountains do not only offer calm they summon fear, Height, vertigo and the shadow of mortality. These feelings or emotions rise to the surface here, sharpened by the sheer drop of a cliff or the sudden emptiness of a snowfield. To face such fear is to meet yourself. The more you stand within it, with calm focus, the more the mountain seems to lean back toward you, acknowledging your courage.
This is felt most keenly when learning to ski. At first, the slope is a theatre of panic speed gathering, direction uncertain, the body unsure of its own balance. But the mountain teaches through surrender. Lean into the fall line, trust the edge of the ski, let the fear rise and ebb like a tide within you. In that rhythm, control is not wrestled but released a flow state that carries you safely, even joyfully, down the slope. It’s only achieved if you push through the fear line and trust in yourself.
It is a strong metaphor for the wider world. Fear is everywhere in change, in loss, in the unknown. But the mountain shows that fear can be companion as well as adversary. To embrace it with steadiness is to discover new skills, new strengths. The adrenaline rush becomes not chaos but clarity, a sharpened awareness of self.
The Alps, then, are not only a place of beauty but of initiation. They remind us that to live fully is to lean outward and down the mountain to move with grace through that rush of fear that might hold us back from ridding the chaos with a rush of joy in our hearts full of trust the knowledge within that will allow you to glide over the top of each bump and dip and to let the slope of fear become the horizon of freedom.
January Studio Notes: Alpine Meditations: Snow
Snow in the Alps is more than weather; it is atmosphere made visible. It falls as a hush, a soft erasure of detail, and suddenly the world is simplified into white and shadow. To walk or paint within it is to enter a different register of time, where sound is absorbed and silence becomes the dominant presence.
Snow carries fear to the avalanche, the hidden crevasse, the vertigo of whiteness without horizon. Yet to stand within it calmly is to feel its other gift, renewal. Each snowfall is a reset, a covering over of yesterday’s tracks, a chance to begin again.
On skis, snow is both surface and teacher. It demands balance, asks for trust, and rewards surrender. The slope becomes a flowing script written in movement, each turn a line of improvisation. Fear rises with speed, but so does exhilaration. To lean into snow is to lean into change itself, to accept that control is never absolute, only negotiated moment by moment and choice by timing.
Snow teaches that silence is not emptiness but potential. Beneath the white lies the seed of return, the promise of thaw. In this way, the mountain reminds us that renewal is always possible, even in the coldest season.
January Log: Returning from the Mountains
I walk back through the woods toward my studio, carrying with me the altitude of recent days. The mountains have left their mark not just in memory, but in the way my mind now moves.
Up there, the palette is stripped back. Rock, snow, perhaps the occasional alpine tree. Sounds are swallowed by distance, muffled by snow. Silence is not absence but presence, a vastness that steadies thought. To think at altitude is to think in clarity, each idea sharpened by the cold air and the pared down world.
Here in the forest, the contrast is immediate. Birds call from every direction, plants push upward in tangled growth, the air is thick with static like a river out of sight but always audible. Life presses in from all sides, a chorus of sound and color.
The shift between these two worlds feels like a reset. The mountains have installed a new operating system in me Mountain 2.0. Outdated processes have been replaced by something leaner, quieter, more focused. In the woods, I notice the noise more keenly, but I also carry the silence within me.
This is the gift of altitude not only the view from above, but the recalibration it brings. To return is to walk with new firmware running, a mind tuned differently, able to hold both onto silence and static while the mountain song of peace and space process my thoughts.
January Studio blog: Between Forest, Mountain, and Sea
Walking through the forest toward my studio, I tread carefully over leaf litter and twigs, moving quietly so as not to disturb the chance presence of deer or hare. This gentle way of walking seems to bring forward the thoughts that linger at the back of my mind. Or least give space to them to come forth.
Yesterday I was in the mountains, held by their altitude and silence. Today, in the woods, the contrast is striking.
This difference makes me wonder about the coast. I have not spent enough time there lately, and I feel drawn to explore the ocean’s horizon as another counterpoint. The sea offers its own vastness, its own stripped back palette of light and space. How might the ocean’s expanse speak to the mountains silence, or to the forest’s abundance?
I imagine sitting by the sea, painting, waiting for realisations to surface. Perhaps the horizon will open new ways of seeing, new rhythms of thought. This feels important now, as I prepare for what will be my largest painting to date a work destined for a London gallery in early March.
The forest, the mountain, the sea each space offers a different operating system for the mind. To move between them is to reset, to recalibrate, to discover fresh ways of expressing the effect these landscapes have on the modern person a place where phones are left behind you can’t look at your phone whilst walking in the woods her favourite tripping you can’t look at your phone in the mountains through fear of falling and I can’t look at you bone at sea for the fear of drowning
January Studio Notes: At the Edge of the Ocean
Yesterday, walking in the woods, I found myself thinking of the sea. Today I followed that thought and came to the shoreline, drawn straight to the edge of the ocean. Standing there, I watched the light disappear into the horizon, working out the contrasts of wave shapes, feeling the energy and rhythm of the water crashing before me.
The woods bring a different kind of rhythm the careful tread through leaf litter and twigs, footsteps that quiet the mind and allow hidden thoughts to rise. The sea, by contrast, is relentless. Its rhythm is not mine but its own the crash of waves, the static hiss of water returning, a sound that fills the air like a river out of sight but everywhere present.
And then there is the horizon that impossible line bending, curving, folding over itself, clouds diminishing as they fall into distance. It is here, at this meeting of sea and sky, that memory and emotion surface. Thoughts of quantum prayers return: beginning with gratitude, moving into thankfulness, then awareness. A sense of walking the right path through quantum possibilities, guided by positive emotion.
The ocean reminds me that decisions are made not in silence alone, but in the midst of chaos. Waves crash, possibilities collide, yet with positive power we can move through them, choosing the life we seek.
Standing at the edge of the sea, I feel the reset again not mountain silence, not forest abundance, but ocean rhythm. Each space offers its own way of thinking, its own operating system.
January Studio Notes:
Holding your gaze on the horizon line of the ocean is a kind of meditation. The mind, confronted with that impossible distance, begins to stretch itself trying to fathom space that cannot be measured, a line that is both finite and infinite. It is as if the ocean offers a threshold the edge of the known world, where thought slips into something older, more elemental, almost divine. It’s too big for the mind and to hold these thoughts in the mind a challenge. The he mind isn’t happy to grasp these concepts it wants simple and easy reward, low power mode. But to behold the horizon isn’t such a thing. Try it? It’s uncomfortable. Why?
Unlike the mountains, which stand still and silent, the sea is restless. Its rhythm is constant motion waves cresting and falling, shadows shifting, light breaking and dissolving. The mountains calm by their stillness; the ocean calms by its repetition. Yet both carry echoes of each other. The shapes of waves resemble ridges, valleys, peaks. To watch the sea is to watch the mountains in fast forward, their rise and fall compressed into seconds rather than millennia.
January Studio Notes: The Rhythm of Repetition
I find myself drawn to repetitive behaviours, and to the patterns that emerge within them. There is something in the act of repeating whether a gesture, a brushstroke, or a daily routine that brings me into a state of calm.
At first, repetition can feel mundane, even mechanical. But as the rhythm settles in, the mind begins to shift. The familiar action becomes a kind of mantra, a pulse that steadies thought and opens space. In that space, the ordinary dissolves, and I find myself transcending the mundane.
It is as though repetition is a doorway. Through it, my mind can travel to memories, to imagined landscapes, to questions that lie beneath the surface. The pattern itself becomes a vessel, carrying me to places I could not reach through novelty alone.
In the studio, this is where the work deepens. Repetition is not stagnation but expansion. Each return to the same gesture reveals something new: a subtle variation, a hidden resonance, a shift in perception. The calm it brings is not empty but full of possibility, full of movement beneath the surface.
Perhaps this is why repetition feels essential to me. It is both anchor and horizon, grounding me in the present while sending my mind outward. In its rhythm, I find not boredom but transcendence.