Falling Upwards: Beauty Through Uncertainty
Falling Upwards III, 2025, oil on canvas, 122 × 91.5 cm
I am writing to share the story imbued in my latest painting, and to explain how the process and meaning are inextricably connected. The painting technique I used in Falling Upwards III is, itself, a metaphor for the life experience the work speaks about.
At first glance, you see clumps of reeds growing in a lagoon. The delicate spikes emerge from watery reflections of the sky. The unconventional composition means the image teeters at the edge of unreality, inviting you to dive into the azure sky and fluffy clouds reflected on the water. Your gaze travels along the arcing reeds and delves into deep shadows. The image evokes a feeling of weightlessness – a spatial indeterminacy in which you’re not quite sure which way is up.
My intention is that you feel drawn in, to explore the forms, textures and complex tapestry of marks. It’s one of those paintings that reveals itself over time – the longer you sit with it, the more you discover. As you hover between the real and the imagined, you experience a sense of intimacy – with Self, and with nature.
I have never made a painting that required more patience and persistence. For nearly two months, I worked with dogged deliberation towards a goal that I wasn’t even sure I’d attain.
To achieve the fine detail, I used a small square synthetic brush, loaded to one-third the length of the bristles. The forms emerged, one mark at a time, one line at a time… After each stroke, the brush needed reshaping and reloading. Each mark required perfect coordination, awareness of my breath, posture and the arc of my arm. Often, the location and direction of the line meant I worked with the painting upside down or on its side.
The mark-making seemed both repetitive and totally idiosyncratic. Paradoxically, I felt intimately connected to the formation of every single line, yet within minutes, it was subsumed into the whole, becoming part of the warp and weft of marks. Even the small inconsistencies could rapidly be assimilated into the picture’s composition.
This process reminded me of how, each day, momentary experiences and thoughts can feel compelling and absorbing in their apparent urgency, but with time, most quickly meld into the continuum of life, forgotten. It is the errant marks in a painting, and in life, the moments filled with pain, trauma and regret, that aren’t so easy to integrate into the whole.
As Falling Upwards III gradually took shape, stroke by stroke, I clung to the vision of what I was striving for. I was on an unfamiliar track, having never used this technique on this scale before. It felt a little crazy. My self-concept as an artist was being stretched, flexing to expand while simultaneously I made restrained, disciplined and precise marks on the canvas. I was pushing up against my own beliefs and values, challenging myself to face complexity and find solutions, travel through uncertainty to embrace change and trust my capacity to create beauty from chaos.
Happily, this arduous process came to an end. The concept that I’d held onto for months seemed to be realised on canvas, enabling both the technique and the subject matter to evoke life’s disorienting moments – those times that challenge us to adapt, reshape our ways of seeing, and discover new pathways forward. As the title of the painting suggests, sometimes falling can be upwards.
