Finding Light, Losing perfection
Over the past few months, my relationship with painting has shifted. I’ve been working at an auction house as a photographer, and being surrounded by antique artworks every day has been inspiring. The small works on paper, like linoprints, woodblock prints, and etchings, held a kind of tactility that made an impression on me. Their uneven edges, faint scribbles, and imperfect surfaces made them feel precious. They reminded me that art doesn’t need to be flawless to matter. In fact, its irregularities are what give it life.
I’ve also been struck by the quiet presence of old landscape paintings. The kind of paintings often dismissed as “unimportant”: local fields, copses of trees fading into bluish distance, shifting light across skies. While photographing them, I felt absorbed by their atmosphere. I felt an unexpected kinship with these painters from a century ago. Artists who, like me, lived among fields and skies and felt compelled to translate that experience into paint. It was as if our lives, separated by time, overlapped in the shared act of trying to hold onto atmosphere. The sense of light enveloping everything; the grass, the tarmac, the wheat, even the viewer. That’s what I want to capture in my work: not a specific scene, but the sensation of being inside an atmosphere.
Since then, my own practice has loosened. I’ve returned to oils, working on small panels of MDF and plywood, letting the material guide me. Oil paint feels tactile and alive. You can push it, scrape it, thin it with linseed, build it with impasto. I’ve been painting over older works, letting fragments resurface beneath new layers. What once felt finished now feels like just another step in a painting’s life.
This process has become more like keeping a sketchbook. Instead of planning, I start with a colour combination or an impression lodged in my memory: sunlight through trees, a flicker of shadow on the road, the warmth of midday. I paint over half-dried surfaces, finding that colours blend into one another like memories colliding. The erasures happen naturally. Layers are lost under new layers, pieces of the painting vanish and are forgotten, but they still belong to the work as much as what remains visible. Each painting becomes less a fixed idea and more an accumulation of time and experience.
Living in the English countryside feeds directly into this. The landscape, the quiet, the small shifts in light and season are not things I want to paint literally, but they shape the atmospheres I want to hold in colour. I don’t see a tree as a tree. I see it as a patch of hue, a field of light, a tone against the sky. My work is about capturing those fleeting impressions, the kind you can’t quite hold on to but that stay with you anyway.
This shift has also led me to begin experimenting with how paintings are framed, thinking about unconventional structures that emphasise their physicality. I’ve made a prototype, and I’m excited to push further, to see how framing can play into the idea of containment, atmosphere, and memory.
They’re not about perfection or polish. They’re about catching hold of light, memory, and atmosphere just long enough to feel them, even as they fade. I’m learning to be at peace with that impermanence, with the fact that things change, dissolve, and are forgotten forever, and to see that as part of the painting, not a loss.
