Sometimes the work of painting is not about beginning something new, but about returning to an old work — and resolving something that was left unfinished.
This painting began as an earlier work. Someone told me they loved it, and that moment of external validation quietened my own instincts. Yet I always knew the painting hadn’t arrived where it needed to be.
So I returned to it.
I reimagined the colours and their relationships, painting over sweeping sections, making new marks and letting the colours and forms speak to one another in new ways. Something bolder, more alive began to emerge.
There’s a beautiful word artists use for this: pentimento. From the Italian pentirsi, meaning “to repent” or “to change one’s mind,” it refers to the traces of earlier layers that remain beneath a painting — the ghosts of earlier decisions still whispering through the work.
Those earlier layers still live inside this work.
As Willem de Kooning once said, “I destroy the picture all the time. But in the end, the picture wins.”
This painting is the result of that quiet struggle — the courage to paint over a work again and again - to pivot, to seek a new direction with complete abandon - to let the picture finally win. Sometimes in life a pivot is all we need.
Medium: Acrylic on canvas with oil pastel
Size: 90cm (H) x 90cm (W)
Hanging: beautifully framed in flooded gum, with wire and hooks for hanging
Signed: on back (also faintly on front)
Sometimes the work of painting is not about beginning something new, but about returning to an old work — and resolving something that was left unfinished.
This painting began as an earlier work. Someone told me they loved it, and that moment of external validation quietened my own instincts. Yet I always knew the painting hadn’t arrived where it needed to be.
So I returned to it.
I reimagined the colours and their relationships, painting over sweeping sections, making new marks and letting the colours and forms speak to one another in new ways. Something bolder, more alive began to emerge.
There’s a beautiful word artists use for this: pentimento. From the Italian pentirsi, meaning “to repent” or “to change one’s mind,” it refers to the traces of earlier layers that remain beneath a painting — the ghosts of earlier decisions still whispering through the work.
Those earlier layers still live inside this work.
As Willem de Kooning once said, “I destroy the picture all the time. But in the end, the picture wins.”
This painting is the result of that quiet struggle — the courage to paint over a work again and again - to pivot, to seek a new direction with complete abandon - to let the picture finally win. Sometimes in life a pivot is all we need.
Medium: Acrylic on canvas with oil pastel
Size: 90cm (H) x 90cm (W)
Hanging: beautifully framed in flooded gum, with wire and hooks for hanging
Signed: on back (also faintly on front)