I was interested to hear Celia Paul’s description of the artist as thick skinned and open hearted. I have to say I wish I was thicker skinned.

My skin feels porous, too easily osmosing discouragement and a general malaise. It can be difficult in difficult times to justify the time and care spent on art which isn’t about the climate crisis, or the middle east or something monumental and political. The art I want to make is intimate and personal, sometimes it is domestic, sometimes frivolous. Sometimes the art is barely understandable to me, but it wants to be made despite this.

I have spent some time in the summer break overhauling a neglected inventory of my work in the form of a very dry spreadsheet. While the family were hurling themselves down waterslides I was tucked into the shade with my laptop. It was initially a chore I had been putting off but became a surprisingly meaningful exercise as I worked back through each series of collage and painting, noting which have sold, where each piece is, putting down definitive titles and collating dimensions and materials all in one place to save my taxed memory, and appear even partly professional and in control.

The process of cataloging the work has helped clarify for me that the themes I am pursuing are the same themes I was interested in ten years ago. A pair of collages I made in 2017 feel pertinent to my paintings of 2025. Why does this matter? I still really like them, they amuse me, and I think they are beautiful. I want to make more intimate pieces that make me laugh and feel elegant and apposite and beautiful. Collage when it’s good just clicks, it fits into place like a jigsaw puzzle. The pictures make themselves. I’ve only recently begun to make paintings which feel like that regularly. They aren’t a struggle, they just flow out of you, and you almost don’t know when or how it happened.

Some pieces remain a struggle, some paintings or collage are hard work or just don’t work. And at that point it can be useful to stop and think why something isn’t working. But it’s a dangerous game to stop and think, what if the world impinges then, and tells you to give it up, it’s not worth your time? What if you get a rejection just then too? What if someone in your life asks you why you bother if you still have to have a day job? How many pieces have you sold recently? Have you exhibited recently?

A few of those questions oozing through my too thin skin and travelling to my too open heart could knock me down permanently. What IS the point?

Reader, the spreadsheet saved me. That act of cataloguing brought me back in contact with old invoices, comments from kind collectors and reminded me of whole series of collages that have flown the nest to frames and walls in other lives. Perhaps there is a place for intimate, domestic and frivolous little collages, or for paintings that are about painting and not world peace.

Thick skinned and open-hearted, I wish.

The Clinch