Finally, I can tell you what's happening! (Copy)

Last week I shared the news that I'll be stepping away from teaching.

Thank you.

I've been overwhelmed by your emails, your comments and your kindness. Endings are always emotional, and so many of you took the time to tell me how much the courses, videos and community have meant to you over the years. I don't think I've quite found the words to express how much that means to me.

What has also struck me is how many of you said something along the lines of, "It feels like the right time" or "this makes absolute sense."

I think you're right.

That thought has stayed with me all week because, the more I look around my studio, the more I realise this wasn't the only chapter that was quietly coming to an end.

In a few weeks my new abstract exhibition opens.

I've been living with these paintings for months now - some of them for over a year. Recently I've been varnishing them, wrapping them, photographing them, and preparing them for the gallery. Looking at them together, I can suddenly see something that wasn't obvious while I was making them.

They feel like goodbye. It's not a sad goodbye - it's more like the deep breath you take before opening a door.

Most of these paintings were made while I was pondering the decision to step away from teaching. I didn't set out to paint endings, but somehow they found their way into the work anyway.

I often think our art knows things before we do. They seem to express whatever is happening beneath the surface long before our rational minds catch up and that's definitely how these feel.

I don't know whether I'll return to abstraction in the future (I've learned not to make too many declarations about what I'll never do again!) but I do know that these paintings belong to a particular moment in my life.

The work in my studio now feels completely different. I'm immersed in the old family photographs. I'm thinking about memory and identity. The work feels quieter, more intimate somehow, and it also feels like a new beginning - about discovering what comes next.

I can see now that's what has been happening all along. Ever since last September, one chapter has been quietly closing while another has been quietly opening. I just didn't know it at the time.

If you'd like to see the exhibition, I have something special to share.

Next Saturday, 4th July, I'll be sending newsletter subscribers an exclusive online private view before the exhibition officially opens.

Wherever you are in the world, you'll be able to browse the full collection, see the paintings together as a body of work and - if one speaks to you - contact the gallery directly to enquire.

I'm only sharing that private viewing link with newsletter subscribers, so if you're reading this, you'll be among the first to see the exhibition.

I'm so excited to share these paintings, because they mark an important moment in my own journey as an artist. And if last week's letter was about making space for the future, perhaps these paintings are the final conversation with the past.

At the end of Taylor Swift's album The Tortured Poet's Department, she sings:

The only thing that's left is the manuscript

One last souvenir from my trip to your shores

Now and then I re-read the manuscript

But the story isn't mine anymore.

That's how I feel - when the gallery doors open on July 4th, and the private view link goes out, the struggles, joys, and growth of the last few years stop being mine and become something public. I am releasing them, as if they were a flock of doves.

I hope they fly free!