Cool Water Drawing

The inspiration for my art comes from my garden. I find that a garden provides everything an artist could wish for. There is a depth of field where different plants compete for sunlight, creating an interesting visual. There are areas of shadows and sunlight, where plants and flowers thrive, providing a diverse range of subjects for my artwork. I aspire to recreate the emotional impact of my experiences through my paintings. I intend to evoke the same feelings in the viewer that I felt when I created the painting. For me, each painting serves as a stepping stone towards the next one, and as a series evolves, the paintings become more abstract. The flowers depicted in my work gradually lose their botanical identity and transform into a representation of their mood and spirit, conveyed through a blend and clash of colours. As an oil painter, I enjoy creating areas of texture through techniques such as scraping, sanding, and repainting the canvas. This is almost symbolic of life itself. I also incorporate thin, transparent glazes on the canvas to suggest a sense of emptiness, which can be a metaphor for life or the gaps between flowers and shrubs in gardens. These areas draw the viewer's attention, and the textured paint creates a focal point of interest. Painting is all about the brush strokes on a canvas. They are crucial to the overall painting and are similar to calligraphic marks that are inherent markings, just like punctuation is essential to a written page. These marks can be dominant or subtle, depending on the layering of paint and washes. Sometimes, they can be so delicate that they are only faintly visible, veiled under layers of paint. On the other hand, they can be pulsing, defined and palpable in the foreground. Viewers often find my brushwork seductive, and they trail their fingers over the canvas to gently trace faint lines so delicate that they are hardly visible. Colour plays an important role in my life. The various colours in the garden range from bright and bold to subtle and soft. You can see shades of pink, red, yellow, orange, purple, and green. The colours in my garden either contrast or harmonize with each other, creating a beautiful sight. I have fuchsia flowers in my garden that look like mini ballerinas with tutus of pale pinkish-white, ranging from different shades of pink to red and violet-purple. These pots of flowers scattered around my garden serve as an inspiration for all my paintings going forward.