My intention was a simple one: To make yellow paintings. While a single colour painting has its appeal too, for me that just isn’t enough.  I needed other colours to play with yellow, while letting yellow shine in all her glory.  

Ever since the completion of that project, I’ve wanted to revisit my encyclopaedic source material, saved for many years, and approach the subject matter in a different way and with a different artistic tool kit.

The time feels right to revisit these books of knowledge and use them for a 100 day project.

Do you choose a word of the year: A word or an idea to hold in your mind to return to when you feel the need to focus your attention? Or perhaps an aspirational word fits better. Or maybe a word that will guide you as an artist?

“Assemblage” is posted in my studio to remind me this is my intention. I am a process driven artist.  Conceptual concerns hold little interest for me in my art practice at the moment.  Making something from nothing and finding beauty in the combination of materials is what interests me. 

When adding a title to a painting or a series of paintings, my goal is to add to the experience of viewing the work without giving it a literal explanation. I want to leave space in the naming for a viewer to bring their own interpretation to what they are seeing. This is why I often fix on a word or phrase that lends a little mystery to the work.

I found a collection of small pieces of paper that I used in another project that had been languishing on a shelf for years. Imagine a fishbowl, just the right size for one little goldfish, filled almost to the top with scraps of torn paper all about 1” square.  Each square is painted either yellow, orange or red on one side.  Imagine that there are several hundred of these little goldfish coloured squares. 

My word for the year is abundance. With every choice that I make with my art I want to have this word, abundance, informing my decisions. For me, abundance means to make more work, work that is finished or not, it doesn’t really matter. My word of the year also means that the work is larger to my previous work, both in volume and in scale.

I started making mini paintings by chance when I was participating in my first art market. Each artist was asked to donate something reflective of their practice to be used as a draw item.  I had some older work on paper that I cut down and mounted on cards, and along with their envelopes, I wrapped up five of these one of a kind greeting cards into a little bundle as my donation.

There have been very few times, as an artist, that I can pinpoint when and where inspiration informs my art practice. Usually, when I begin a new series of work, it's the materials that drive the process, the paint and paper and mark making tools. Recently though I was struck by the most ordinary of objects as a source of inspiration...beach stones.