What if your best ideas are hiding in plain sight?

Last week I wrote about the unexpected benefits of taking a break from the studio.

My mum had been staying with me for a week, and instead of painting, I spent my days seeing friends, visiting a gallery, shopping, and going out for lunch, and my evenings watching films and playing word games.

I didn't lift a single paintbrush.

I had expected to find that frustrating, but instead the opposite happened. By the time I went back into the studio, I was itching to make something. But interestingly, I didn't start a painting.

I've noticed that I can't just dive into a new painting whenever I have the time. There seems to be a space before each one begins.

I look at photographs. I think about them. I wait. I might decide on one and then change my mind. And then suddenly something shifts and the energy arrives. I know which photograph I want to use and I want to start NOW.

I've learned to wait for that feeling. So there I was, back in the studio, full of creative energy but not yet ready to start the next painting.

And while I was waiting, I picked up an old book.

It's actually an altered book — an old printed book that I've painted, drawn and collaged into — and I made most of it in 2022 and 2023.

I hadn't looked through it properly for a long time.

And as I turned the pages, I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing.

The seeds of my current work were everywhere.

Layered collage made with vintage papers. Old, antiqued surfaces. Raw, messy mark-making. Drawing. Photographs of children collaged onto old papers and abstract marks.

There was even a drawing of my brother and me as children, made from the exact photograph I recently used as inspiration for a large painting in my new series.

It was all there and yet I hadn't thought any of it mattered at the time. These were just things I did in between making my abstract paintings.

Now, four years later, I can see that I was already exploring the ideas that have become central to my work - I just didn't know it yet.

I've been thinking about this all week. I think we're very quick to decide which bits of our creative work matter.

This is a proper painting. This is just a sketch. This is the serious work. This is me messing around.

But perhaps we're not always the best judges. Sometimes an idea needs to sit around for a while before we're ready for it. Sometimes we're drawn to something without understanding why. And sometimes the thing we're doing while avoiding the "real" work turns out to contain the seeds of what comes next.

Looking at the book made me want to work in it again, only now I saw it differently.

I didn't want it to be a sketchbook or a place to work things out. I wanted the book itself to become an object — an artwork in its own right.

(This is known as an artist's book, and it's an art form quite separate from painting. The book isn't a container for preparatory work. The book IS the work.)

So I started building on what was already there. And then, because apparently one wasn't enough, I started another.

I'm having so much fun!

I always use old books that have outlived their usefulness, and I have to admit that I particularly enjoy choosing ones whose contents annoy me.

The original book is an Edwardian book called The Sayings of Children, filled with twee poems and stories about angelic children saying sickeningly sweet things.

I have taken enormous pleasure in obliterating all that sweetness with paint, charcoal, collage and messy marks.

The new one is even more fun.

It's an old instructional book about pen and ink drawing, full of rigid pronouncements about the right and wrong ways to draw. The tone is incredibly pompous and dictatorial — clearly written by a man who considers himself vastly superior to his intended audience of young ladies whiling away their time until they marry.

You can probably imagine how much pleasure I'm getting from painting all over THAT.

I know some people find what I do to books outrageous. Whenever I show an altered book, someone will tell me that they could never paint over a book. Books are precious and should be preserved.

But I don't believe that simply being a book makes an object inviolate.

Mein Kampf is a book.

We preserve historically important copies of books like that because preserving history matters. That doesn't mean we have to honour every physical book ever printed, regardless of what it contains or whether anybody still wants it.

These aren't rare first editions. They're unwanted old books that have survived long enough to end up in junk shops and secondhand piles, and I love giving them another life.

Actually, I think the destruction is part of the appeal. There is something very satisfying about taking a book that tells me the correct way to draw and drawing all over it incorrectly.

About covering sentimental ideas of childhood with something messier and more complicated. And about taking someone else's words and images and allowing fragments to remain while other parts disappear.

Which, now that I think about it, isn't very far removed from what I'm doing in my paintings.

I'm working with old photographs and memories. I'm obscuring things and revealing others. I'm layering the present over the past. I'm taking something that already exists and changing its meaning.

And once again, I'm struck by the fact that I didn't consciously plan any of this. I picked up an old book because I wasn't ready to start a painting. I thought I was just filling the gap.

But perhaps those gaps are much more important than I realise. Because four years ago, when I thought I was just messing around between paintings, I was already making the work I'm making now.

I simply hadn't caught up with it yet.