This is my secret ... but it's so hard to explain

This week, a friend commented that each of my new paintings seems to go to a new place. In each one, something different happens. I told her "it's because I'm following, not leading."

This is something that has taken me such a long time to truly learn, even if I have always known it was the best way to work. As a confirmed control freak, I have always liked to think I am in charge of how things go ... and struggle to trust in things working out without my intervention.

But the best thing about being an artist is that we learn constantly. The work takes us into new parts of ourselves and helps us develop them. 

As I've developed these ideas about memory, family and connection, each painting has turned out to have its own unique message. I start each one in the same way - with a charcoal drawing on a painted canvas - but then they take on a life of their own. We start a dialogue. The painting asks questions and I answer.

"What if you tried this?" it says.

OK, I answer and I try it. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. If it doesn't, the painting says 'maybe this would be better?" and so I try that.

And the thing is, it feels as if the painting knows where we're supposed to go. Each thing it suggests is a necessary step on the path to where we are going.

In my more fanciful moments, I picture a infinite number of paintings waiting in the atmosphere; formless and unseen until artists find the ideas and start to make them. They know what they want to be, and they simply guide us until we get there.

If I'm right, our job is to do less and listen more, and that's what has made the difference for me.

These days, I never start a painting session as soon as I walk into the studio. Instead I make a cup of tea and sit in a chair looking at what happened the day before. And then I wait. I wait for an idea to appear, rather than forcing one. It's a subtle but important difference.

So, the painting might say 'we need more colour.' Sometimes it suggests a colour but sometimes I have to choose. Then, either that improves things or it makes things worse. At which point, the painting will say 'that's too bright' or 'that looks too loud.' And then I will choose something else that is less bright or less loud and see how that works.

And so we go, back and forth. 

This slowing down and listening also allows me to spot the point of divergence. This is the place where the painting finds its own identity, which is different from all the others. 

The point of divergence emerges through something that happens while I'm working. I never know what it will be. In one painting, it was the idea to make one figure crystal clear and the other faint and barely registered. In another painting, it was the idea to have a detailed portrait without a mouth. In my current painting, it seems to be all about line work.

This means that each painting has something different to say and as I follow the clues, I find out what it is.

Here is an example that I'm currently developing.

It started out as a drawing that went wrong - the proportions were terrible. I tried to cirrect them but there was so much charcoal already on the surface that it was getting confusing. So to help myself, I picked up a coloured pastel and drew with that.

The effect was surprising and interesting. I didn't like the colours - these were only chosen because they would make it easy to see what I was changing - but I loved the effect. I decided outlines were meant to play a part in this piece and for a while I kept playing with them as I developed the drawing. But as I kept following the ideas that came to me, many of the lines were lost.

My painting was becoming more colourful and less about drawing. Until the idea came 'add back in some outlines, but this time use paint.'

So I did

I had to stop at this point and won't get back to it for a few days, but I love what's happening. The white outlines add something so powerful. They somehow convey emotion and time and memory and I have no idea why. I certainly couldn't have come up with this idea had I not gone through multiple iterations, following the nudges as they arrived in my brain.

And the painting is different from everything that has come before, while also clearly fitting into the same body of work.

It's magical, this process of painting ... but only if we let it be. Only if we can get out of our own way for long enough to allow the ideas to come through us.