This week I got pretty frustrated.

I’m in the last few weeks of painting time, before my solo show at the end of October. I have a lot of paintings that are not finished. The work is going well and I have nine pieces that are complete and drying, but there are more that are still to find their way over the finish line.

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During a painting session, when I am working on a large series like this, I work on a few pieces together at a time, switching between each painting, making a few moves on each. As they are oils, doing as much as I can until they just need to dry before I can go further. This means I need a lot of space to accommodate the work. I’m managing by putting pieces that are at the drying stage on the landing.

Making Space to Sit and Look

However, what I’m really missing is the space to just sit and look.

A key aspect of my process is to have the work hanging or leaning up against walls, with somewhere to just sit and gaze at it, and enough space to do it comfortably. Over the last few years this has become a key aspect of how I work. It’s something I talk about to people I coach. I describe it as being with the work. What I mean by this, is giving yourself time to be with the paintings. To allow the work to impact you. To be curious about your responses. To spend time noticing. When I’m making work in this way – a big series of work for a show I will pop into the studio at random times of the day. First thing in the morning as I’m having my first cuppa I would regularly sit on the sofa in the bigger studio and just look. I’d do it a lunchtime, in the evenings. Often before bed.

Finding a Felt Sense

What happens when I do this?

Sometimes I just sit and look quietly. Sometimes I get up and move things around. Put different paintings alongside different paintings. Rotate. Change the order of things on the wall. Get up close and look at how texture and marks are working. Sometimes painting gets turned to the wall so I can’t see it for a while. It’s not a particularly analytical process it’s much more emotional and sensory based. I’m less in my head and more in my body letting information come from a felt sense of the work rather than eyes and brain working.

And slowly ideas and thoughts start to form in response. I begin to give words to things that seem important. The use of particular colours together that bear repeating. A composition idea. Something to repeat again – charcoal marks, collage on fabric. A smooth area of quiet paint alongside the dense worked surface. What the work as a whole seems to be about.

An Small Studio

I don’t quite have space for that anymore. A few months ago in the process of getting our house ready to sell , I moved back upstairs into my old studio space. It’s a perfectly adequate room for painting but it is small. Too small for the size and amount of work I’m making currently and too small to have anything in there I can sit on. So, my process has changed. The work that’s finished is sitting on the landing and the work that’s in process is on the floor and a few pieces are hanging in the limited space available.

The fact that these are oil paintings adds another layer of difficulty. I always forget quite how extraordinarily messy working with oils can be—or perhaps how messy I am when working with them. Going into the studio to move things around means changing into painting clothes, not just because it is almost impossible not to brush against something in such a small space, but also because all the edges are wet and just lifting a painting will result in paint smears on my hands.

A Hazardous Activity!

Add to this, there are wet and partly dry surfaces everywhere, along with fragments of scraped-off paint that fall onto the floor and can then be walked out onto the landing carpet. In the larger studio, I could spread the paintings around the walls and look without having to handle them constantly. Here, looking at one thing often means moving three other things first. Even standing quietly with the work becomes a slightly hazardous activity. And this week I really needed to see what I had been doing, to get a better sense of the scale and range of the work.

The key thing that comes from this process of slow looking, is that I get a strong sense of what each painting is about, I see it in context of the whole, and where it fits. And I’m finding that difficult to do with limited space. Hence this week’s frustration.

A Work Around

I have found a bit of a work around. I’ve taken photos of everything and organised them into groups. Finished, not finished, colour relationships, larger smaller. It’s less than ideal but it’s something. What’s felt more useful from doing this was actually taking the photographs and grouping them because that involved some looking and deciding. What was finished. What still needs some work but is close. What really isn’t. But this was a visual sorting and not the long slow looking and feeling my way forward that I’m used to. And images are vastly different to being in the same space as a group of pieces and feeling how they interact together. Ultimately there’s no substitute for that.

Allowing Frustration

What I’ve also realised is that I’ve allowed my frustration with the lack of space to overpower the looking. Because I couldn’t do what I used to do, sit on the sofa, put my feet up and enjoy a quiet half-hour with the work, I wasn’t doing it at all.

I don’t need to move paintings or change into painting clothes several times a day. I can stand in the doorway, where I can see quite a lot of the work, I can use gloves if I need to move something, and I can spend a few minutes noticing what catches my attention.

Then I can come back later and look again.

It isn’t as cosy, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t as useful. I started doing it this morning and already something feels different. The change that was needed wasn’t another reorganisation of the studio. (although that might help) It was a shift in my own mindset about what being with the work had to look like.

And this weekend? I may reorganise the studio anyway, because somewhere to sit would still be nice. But until then, the doorway will do.

Looking towards autumn

September is nearly here, bringing that familiar sense of new beginnings with the question of what autumn months might hold. If you’re thinking about giving more sustained attention to your abstract painting practice, you can download the Directions in Abstraction prospectus to learn more about the programme, how we work and whether it might be right for you.

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It’s Thursday morning and we are having some much-needed rain in Buxton. The scent of petrichor is coming in through the open window as I sit at my desk. Occasional drifts bring cool air and the scent of rain and wet earth. Rain splashes off the guttering, the susurration increasing as it hits the trees, getting heavier and heavier.

While it’s raining, I’m taking the opportunity to do some early morning writing.

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This week has been a quiet one, with a trip to the art supplier to get more paint as the new work jumps ahead. There are only a couple of what I know will feel like very short months until my show at Saan1 in Manchester. And if you’ve not yet noted the dates, it runs from Thursday 29 October to Sunday 1 November.

This week’s insight is about something I posted on Instagram: how we deal with a gap in our art practice.

The reasons for this can be many—we’ve just completed a project or had a show. Life events may have taken over for a while, and we are finding our way back in. We may have reached the end of something we were exploring, and the next idea has yet to arrive. We may simply be a bit stuck and unsure what comes next. So the question becomes: how do we find that next idea?

“When there’s a gap in your art practice, you can’t think your way out of it. You have to make your way out of it.”

In my experience, both from my own work and from working with others, thinking too hard about what the next thing might be is rarely helpful. I don’t mean reflecting, wondering or noticing; I mean rumination. Going over similar ground with the same questions, perhaps with a touch of anxiety underneath, fuelling repetitive thought patterns.

It makes sense that when we’re not making, we start thinking about ideas for how to begin again. But often we wait for something to feel clear enough or interesting enough to start. The risk is that nothing does, and we stay in the gap. Trying to imagine what we will feel like making is not the same as actually making.

There’s a definite shift between different modes of thinking. While reflective practice, looking outwards and noticing sources of inspiration can be useful, what is probably most helpful is to make—and use this as the fuel.

In my experience, ideas develop because we’ve stayed in contact with the work. This often means making without a clear destination, noticing what happens and responding to what’s in front of us. Being open to what’s happening and not looking for outcomes or needing things to lead somewhere. Just making enough room for something to emerge.

The best way in is to start something—literally anything. Start moving paint around, drawing or making marks, and see what happens. Let each thing you do spark the next. Listen for those internal suggestions of “what if?” and let that be your guide.

With this kind of process, we really don’t know what the work might become. For me, the excitement comes from discovery. Making in order to find out.

When you’ve had a gap, what has helped you find your way back into the work?

What Next?

As September approaches, perhaps you’re beginning to think about your next move in your art practice. Processes like this—making your way towards ideas rather than waiting for them to arrive—are a central part of what we explore in my course Directions in Abstraction. I currently have a small number of one-to-one places available, and you can begin straight away. If you’re interested, drop me an email and we can have a conversation about whether it’s right for you.

I’m a little dot, two or three years old, and I have a pink blanky.

Blanky goes everywhere with me. It comes to bed. It gets dragged around the garden. I probably suck on the corners. It is very possibly grubby and a bit smelly, but it is also pink, soft and warm. I hold it at night, drag it around during the day, and cuddle it on the sofa. When I am sad, it comforts me. It is also a cloak, a dress, the roof of a hiding place, a magic shield.

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Blanky annoys my mum. It is smelly, I take it everywhere, and I do not want to be parted from it.

Then, one day, it disappears.

I search everywhere. Mum says she does not know where it is.

Eventually, I open the tall white cupboard set into the wall. Its brass handle is slightly battered. Inside are bare wooden shelves, the pine dark against the white door. There are shoe-cleaning things, tins of polish and various dusters. Among them, I see pieces of pink. I know immediately that it is Blanky.

I pick up one of the pieces. Blanky has been cut into squares, and only one or two of them are in the cupboard. Across the pink fabric is a curved smear of dust, the mark left by wiping a cloth over a surface. It feels waxy, dusty and grubby in my hand. It smells of the slightly perfumed furniture polish that comes in a tin.

I am heartbroken. I know what has happened, although nobody tells me.

Many parents will recognise the importance a particular blanket, teddy, jumper, toy, or otherwise unremarkable object can acquire for a small child. They drive miles to retrieve one that has been left behind. They know that buying another, apparently identical one will not necessarily help. To the child, it is not interchangeable. It is not simply an object.

The Beginnings of Play

Winnicott called such objects transitional objects, and linked them closely with the beginnings of play.

This memory returned to me as I began writing about Creative Sparks, a short, playful challenge I ran in July. I had intended to write a fairly straightforward piece about exploratory practice. Instead, I found myself thinking about why play can feel so difficult—and about what makes it possible in the first place.

Part of the difficulty begins with the word itself. For many adults, play is associated with children’s games, lightness, frivolity, or a lack of seriousness, so it is understandable that the term can feel uncomfortable.

Add to that the question of personal history. Some people carry early experiences of play that were complicated, restricted, or shaped by circumstances that left little room for freedom.

For example, play may have been:

· over-controlled or directed by parents;

· seen as trivial, childish, or unacceptable;

· pushed aside because responsibility arrived early and there simply was not time for it.

So with this as context, the idea of free-flowing play where we clear the decks of responsibility, limitation, restriction or direction can feel quite difficult. It’s also why I’ve started using the term exploratory practice as a way of side-stepping some of the resistance to the idea of play.

What is play?

Following the connection between my blanket and play led me down a Winnicott rabbit hole.

Donald Winnicott was a British psychoanalyst writing in the mid-twentieth century. For Winnicott, a transitional object belongs to an intermediate area between the child’s inner reality and the external world. The object is materially real, but it is also invested with the child’s own meaning and imaginative life. He saw the child’s use of a transitional object as both an early experience of play and symbolism. A blanket is still a blanket, but in play it can also become a cloak, a roof, or a magic shield. A teapot can pour a potion; a stick can become a sword, a wand, or a superhero’s weapon. The child does not need to choose between what the object really is and what it becomes in their imagination. Both can exist at once. This intermediate or potential space, where inner experience meets the external world, is where play begins.

In Playing and Reality, Winnicott describes play for both adults and children as a freely entered, absorbed, and imaginative activity. It allows us to explore the meeting point between ourselves and the world, without needing to control the outcome or decide in advance what it means.

Several qualities define play in Winnicott’s sense:

· It is spontaneous.

· The person becomes absorbed in the activity and does not need to decide, for a while, whether everything is “real” or imagined.

· It involves doing and manipulating, not merely thinking or fantasising.

· It requires enough safety and trust for the player to risk bringing something personal into the world.

· Its value lies largely in the experience itself, rather than in achieving a predetermined result.

· It allows inner reality and the external world to meet, producing something new.

What strikes me most is the idea of play as a meeting point between the artist’s inner reality and the outer world. Through play, the way we experience the world can find expression. When we are able to play freely, we open up a part of ourselves and allow it to take form.

What does this look like in practice?

In practice, this means giving free rein to our curiosity and exploratory inclinations. It means allowing them to lead the way, even when we do not yet know where they are taking us.

Exploratory practice, or play, is often built from an accumulation of experiences, influences, inspirations, and noticings. We are out in the world; things happen to us; we experience, notice, and absorb all kinds of things, from the mundane to the dramatic.

All of that goes into the creativity bucket and gets stirred together.

Then, when we allow ourselves to play freely, when we are spontaneous, open, absorbed, and safe enough to begin, something may rise to the surface, in the form of : What if I tried this?

Play, or exploratory practice in action, creates space for those moments to arise.

This matters because it builds habits around play and exploratory practice. We become more trusting of impulses rooted in curiosity and exploration. We get into the habit of listening for, and leaning towards, those intuitive moments when we wonder: What if I tried this? Over time, this does more than add to the current threads of our practice. It opens wider possibilities we might not have planned for, leading us into unexpected directions, new ways of working, and forms of work we would not have reached through intention alone.

Then, when those moments crop up in the bigger, more “serious” work, we are more likely to follow them rather than second-guessing ourselves and doing nothing.

It is also worth considering some of the messages and beliefs that get in the way of play.

Play and seriousness

One belief I hear often from people I teach and coach is the belief in seriousness: the idea that when you go into your studio, you should be doing something “serious”. In this context, serious usually means making finished work.

Anything that is not obviously directed towards making finished work can then be seen as avoidance. If it does not look productive, purposeful, or connected to an outcome, it can feel as though it does not count as proper studio work.

Of course, there is a time and place for focused finished work: a deadline, an exhibition, an open call. But without time spent in exploration, the risk is that the work can end up in a creative backwater, becoming repetitive rather than alive.

Permission and prohibition

During the Creative Sparks challenge, one thing became clear: people often still need permission, even when they have been making work for a long time.

When permission comes from somebody else, we may start trying to please or accommodate them. We may second-guess what they want, or try to work out what they are looking for, before we allow ourselves to begin.

I have seen this happen even when I offer what I intend to be an open-ended prompt: an invitation to explore something and follow where it leads. People will sometimes ask questions that seem less about clarifying the prompt and more about trying to get it “right”. It can sound as though they are looking for a hidden answer, a correct outcome, or some clue about what I want from them, when my intention is simply to provide a spark for their own direction and ideas.

In that moment, permission can become another form of limitation.

The person offering permission can begin to feel like the person who also has the power to prohibit. Even when it is offered as generously as possible, I wonder if permission can be experienced as completely open-ended, because people rarely receive permission in a vacuum. They bring previous experiences of teaching and learning with them: experiences of being corrected, assessed, praised, overlooked, misunderstood, or told there was a right way to do something. Those experiences can shape how permission is heard. Even an open invitation can be filtered through old habits of trying to read the room, anticipate expectations, avoid getting it wrong, or produce the kind of response that seems likely to be approved.

So when someone is offered permission to explore, they may still be negotiating with all those earlier experiences. The freedom being offered in the present can meet memories of restriction from the past, and that can influence how free they actually feel to respond.

Courses, challenges, and prompts

Courses, challenges, and prompts can all play an important role in an artist’s development. Courses help us learn and extend our skills, while challenges and prompts can provide a starting point for project work, help us through stuck moments, and create opportunities for community and collaboration.

These structures may begin with an idea offered by somebody else, but that does not mean the work that grows from them is any less exploratory or personal. A shared prompt can lead artists in entirely different directions, and a course can provide a framework within which curiosity, play, and unexpected discoveries have plenty of room to emerge. Structure and exploratory practice are not opposites; sometimes a structure gives us enough focus or containment to take risks we might not otherwise take.

At the same time, exploratory practice also needs opportunities to find its direction. As we become more familiar with our creative process, we can begin to notice and trust our impulses, questions, and what if moments. We become more able to follow an idea without needing to know where it will lead—or needing somebody else to provide the starting point.

This is not a simple progression from relying on external structures to leaving them behind. We may move between structure and self-direction throughout our creative lives. At times, our own curiosity will be enough to carry the work forward; at others, a course, challenge, or prompt may offer exactly the focus, companionship, or helping hand we need. The aim is not to become entirely independent of outside structures, but to develop enough trust in our own process that we can use them as supports rather than feeling bound by them.

So does play need structure?

So does play need structure?

I don’t think play needs to be structured. It can be random, open-ended, unpredictable, and even chaotic. What may need more deliberate attention are the conditions that allow play to happen: enough time, space, safety, and freedom from the demand to produce a particular result.

This is where courses, challenges, and prompts can be useful. Their structure does not have to determine what happens within it. Instead, it can provide a temporary container: somewhere to begin, something to respond to, or a reason to set aside time for exploration. At its best, the structure supports the play without directing its outcome.

Creative Play Lab

Creative Play Lab is a self-paced online course exploring the conditions that make creative play possible. Through practical exercises, reflective notes and accessible theory, it looks at space, permission, imagination, momentum and flow—not to tell you what to make, but to help you recognise and trust your own exploratory process.

Find out more about Creative Play Lab

When You Know How to Finish the Work

Yesterday was a good morning for clearing my head: one of those cool, damp summer mornings we often get in Buxton. Light cloud, the odd spot of rain, refreshing and clear after the heat of last week.

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Bruce and I were out for a long walk and some thinking. The day was planned as much-needed studio time, I have a solo show planned for the autumn at Saan1 in Manchester, and the days and weeks are passing, with an ever-growing sense of time moving on, while the paintings are still sitting in that, “showing progress but not finished” state. And I knew I really wasn’t feeling it.

The thought of paint, the studio, the work — none of it was calling to me. So, I got curious.

It has been a couple of weeks since I had any proper studio time. The work has been drying, and I’ve had a small exhibition in between. Usually, after a break, I’m champing at the bit to get going again, eager to see what the next moves are.

But this morning, as I did my usual thing of popping into the studio to see where I was up to, all I felt was: meh.

This is something I often do first thing. I go in and look at the current work before I’ve properly started the day, before I’ve made any decisions about what needs doing. And usually, as I look, something begins to stir. I feel interested. Engaged. Curious. There’s a sense of connection to the paintings. I start to feel what they might be about, where the energy is, what the next move could be.

It’s not always that I can see how they might look finished. It’s more that I can feel the enquiry in them. Something is alive enough to pull me towards it.

But this time, that didn’t happen.

I looked at the paintings and felt very little. They just didn’t feel that interesting.

The Risk of Repeating Yourself

I could finish them now, but they wouldn’t be saying much that was new. They would be “Lin does stripes using oil paint.” Perfectly decent paintings, probably, but work I already know how to do. What I mean by this is that there isn’t a live line of enquiry. I’m no longer questioning how to make these paintings. And that isn’t exciting to me.

This is something I think happens in many artists’ practices. The structures that help us begin — a way of composing, a set of materials, a reliable process, a familiar visual language — can become restrictive if we don’t notice when they have done their job.

So, the feeling of “I know how to finish these” is both good and bad.

Good, because it’s a sign of professional experience. I’ve been painting long enough now to know how to bring things to a conclusion when I need to.

Bad, because in the case of this work, I’d be bringing the paintings to a close before I’d finished exploring them. I’d be using a familiar approach which is, for me: decide what the composition is, work out what fits and what doesn’t, adjust, edit, resolve.

Lin does stripes.

And that was the problem.

I’d be finishing the paintings in the way I’ve learnt to finish them. Which meant doing what I already know, rather than looking for a new way forward.

Once I realised that this was the source of my disquiet, my energy changed. I could feel my interest reactivating in the new question – how do I push these further?

So what next?

I started by looking more carefully, noticing what felt alive and what felt too much.

I noticed the areas that still had energy in them, the parts that seemed to be opening something up. I also noticed the places that felt too stripey, too resolved, too much like a version of a painting I already knew how to make.

Listening for What’s Alive

So I began taking things out.

I blocked out areas. I made bigger moves. I rotated pieces. I brought in new materials. I let go of the idea that I knew what the paintings were about, and tried instead to let them show me what they wanted to become.

Some areas felt vibrantly alive and needed more space around them. Other areas were clamouring for attention in a way that was noisy and unnecessary. They didn’t need refining; they needed removing. What was working in one piece began to inform another, but I tried not to turn that into a formula. I didn’t want to simply repeat the thing that had worked in the previous painting. Each time, I tried to listen to the particular painting in front of me.

It felt like a different kind of attention. Less about using a familiar answer and more about letting the work speak more clearly.

When Scaffolding Becomes Restrictive

A few weeks ago, I realised the underlying structure of my work had changed. At first, I thought it had changed into stripes. But what I’ve realised now is that something has loosened enough that I no longer need the same kind of underlying structure across all the work.

Each painting can have its own structure.

When I first started making this kind of work, structure gave me something to build on. It gave me consistency. It helped me make decisions. Without some kind of underlying composition — blocks, spaces, lines, repeated forms — the whole thing could feel too open, too overwhelming. Too many choices, too many options, not enough clarity.

I was still in the process of exploring and mastering my visual language, not yet fully confident about what belonged in a painting and what didn’t. The structure gave me a way in. It gave me scaffolding.

But now the structures that once supported the work are starting to feel restrictive. They still work, but they no longer feel interesting enough. I can make those paintings. I know how to finish them. But knowing how to finish them is not the same as needing to make them.

Now I think I’m grounded enough in my own visual language to take some of that structure away. Not all of it, perhaps, but enough to let each painting find its own form rather than taking each one through the same underlying system.

That shift feels important.

It’s opening up exploration in a different way. I can look more closely at what is actually happening in each painting, rather than asking it to fit a structure I already understand.

Looking back, the composition structure in my work over the last few years has been about space, blocks and lines. The stripe pieces brought in something newer, but I think they were more transitional than I first understood.

Now the work feels looser. The stripes and blocks are morphing into something else.

I’m working this through as I write, which is often how these things happen. When you’re in the middle of something, it’s hard to see exactly what it means. It’s often only with hindsight that we get a clearer view of what we were really exploring.

For now, I can see that something is definitely moving. Materials are combining with oil painting in new ways. There are technical challenges. There are surprises. The work is asking different things of me.

Letting Each Painting Find Its Own Structure

The other insight is about what makes a series of work.

Previously, I think a lot of my series have been close explorations of one or two ideas, with variation coming through colour and size. The same idea looked at bigger, smaller, in blue and orange, in pink and brown. Or something like that.

This series feels different.

I’m realising what is interesting me, is to push enquiry further and differently across the paintings. There is a connection, and the relationship between them can be seen, but these connections feel more fluid. I’m being more exploratory. I’m allowing each painting to have more autonomy. And I’m taking the enquiry broader and wider each time.

Whatever is happening, when I look across the work, it feels like there is more going on between the pieces.

What This Means for Your Own Work

If you’re looking at your own work and feeling bored, flat or oddly resistant, it may not mean the work has failed. It may mean you are trying to finish it with an old solution.

Sometimes the question is not, “How do I resolve this?” but “What structure am I still using that the work no longer needs?”

Not a long piece this week. More of a studio process note, really. Hot on the heels of a show, I’m still catching up and getting things back to normal, and my summer challenge starts very soon, so there is preparation to do for that too.

Which feels fitting, really, because Creative Sparks is all about this kind of noticing: making small experimental moves, paying attention to what feels alive, and seeing where the work wants to go next.

If you want to join me for 12 days of experimentation in July, you can sign up at the link below.

Join Creative Sparks

A morning in the admin swamp

This morning was one of those mornings where a couple of simple, perfectly reasonable messages opened the door to a swamp of admin.

The messages weren’t the problem. The problem was the overcomplicated system sitting behind it.

It began with someone asking about an event that was supposed to be happening this evening, but which I’d had to cancel. They had booked quite some time ago, as a guest through my website, which means I have no easy way to track the order down. The website has a lot of “guests.”

So then I have to reply and inconvenience the person. Apologies, tonight is cancelled so yes of course I will refund. Can they find the order number? Probably not. I know it was at least six months ago. So, okay, default to bank details and a transfer.

All of which is doable, but it takes time and an exchange of several messages.

At the same time, somebody else was trying to book a coaching session with me. I’d sent them the wrong Calendly link, which meant it was trying to charge them the full listed price, even though we had already agreed a different arrangement.

More messages. New link. This time the right one.

In the middle of all this, I managed to post a Reel on Instagram about my upcoming Creative Sparks Challenge. And because I have a shop connected to my account, Meta helpfully decided to tag a painting that happened to be sitting in the background.

Not the correct painting, of course.

And I couldn’t remove the tag, because Meta. Apparently working software is still an optional extra.

When the system is bigger than the need

All of which got me thinking again about running a creative business, and how, as a single person, do you make things more straightforward. How do you make them fit for purpose? What systems, processes and technology do you actually need?

In essence, I’m talking about something I’ve thought for a long time is an important foundation stone in running any business, and I do mean any business:

Is it fit for purpose?

Does the mechanism, the process, the technology, the system you’re planning to use actually meet the need you have?

That seems such a simple question, but it gets missed or misunderstood surprisingly often. Bigger and more complex is not always better. The simplest solution is often the one to go for.

We don’t need an aircraft carrier when a shopping trolley will serve the purpose just as well.

I hold my hand up here. I have fallen into this trap myself.

Not that long ago, I was using an all-singing, all-dancing platform for my courses and groups. It was expensive and, in the end, I decided it was massively over-engineered for what I actually needed it to do.

It was one of those pieces of software where you spend most of your time working out how to use it and the other half of your time explaining to everyone else how to use it.

It offered lots of features: a community section like Facebook, video hosting, a place to run courses, control the release of content and lessons, run quizzes, and a whole load more features I never got to explore.

Too much machinery, not enough connection

Another example: like many artists, I have had an e-commerce element on my website. In other words, a retail function that allows people to set up accounts and buy products, just as they would from any larger online shop.

People do buy paintings directly from my website, and I am always genuinely delighted when they do. Smaller works, sale pieces and lower-priced paintings can and do sell that way.

But even when it works, I still find myself asking whether this is the best way for original artwork to be sold.

If someone is considering a more expensive painting, there is often more to the decision than clicking “add to basket”. They may need more photographs. They may want to know about shipping. They may want to see it in a room setting. They may want to talk to me about the work.

So while online sales can happen, I’m increasingly aware that the buying process for original artwork often needs more space, more context and more human connection than a standard shop checkout allows.

Every time I create a new work, the e-commerce process asks me to treat it like a retail product. Photograph it, write the description, upload it, categorise it, manage the back end of the shop, and then leave it sitting there as a product listing.

For some kinds of businesses, that makes perfect sense. If you are selling bags of coffee, greetings cards, candles, or repeatable products with regular transactions, the shop structure earns its keep.

But an original painting is one item. It has scale, surface, texture, presence and context. A product description can give some of that, but it can’t do the whole job.

So the process becomes both too much and not enough.

Too much technical machinery around a single piece of work.

Not enough of the human exchange that often helps someone decide whether this is a painting they want to live with.

That doesn’t mean the work is not sellable.

It means the sales process is different.

So why do we do this?

Why we overbuild

How do we end up with the technology equivalent of the aircraft carrier?

I think there are a few things going on.

First, we look around and see what other people are doing. We follow the received wisdom. Sometimes that is useful, but not always.

Second, we often lack knowledge. We are working things out as we go.

I’ve been in business in one form or another for a long time. I’ve worked in sales and marketing. I’ve had my own private practice as a psychotherapist. I’ve provided training, coaching, education, and now I also sell paintings.

But selling original artwork online is different from sending invoices for therapy sessions or taking bookings for training. It has its own rhythm and its own set of needs.

I think I defaulted, as many people do, to the idea that you set up some kind of shop.

What I am coming to realise is that, for original paintings, this is often not necessary. In fact, what is needed may be a much more human connection.

Someone sees a painting they are interested in. They email. We have a conversation. I send more images. We talk about the space it might live in. I send a payment link or an invoice. We discuss delivery or shipping properly.

That feels much more appropriate than asking someone to create an account on a website and proceed through a checkout as though they are buying a jumper.

There are places where a mechanism is useful. A simple checkout may make sense for a PDF download, a low-cost challenge, or some kinds of course booking. But even there, it is worth asking whether the system is actually reducing admin, or quietly creating more of it.

The other factor, I think, is anxiety.

We want to look professional. We can easily start to believe that professionalism means having all the bells and whistles: the shop, the platform, the automations, the booking system, the product tags, the clever integrations.

But if the bells and whistles don’t work, or if you end up spending huge amounts of time just trying to keep the machinery functioning, then they are not serving you.

Does this serve me — and does it serve my customer?

So the next question is:

Does this serve me?

And also:

Does this serve my customer?

Does my customer actually want to buy from me in this way?

Would they prefer a payment link after a conversation?

Would they appreciate a Zoom call where we can talk about the work and where it might go?

If someone is interested in a painting, do they want to set up an account on my website? Or would they prefer to email the artist and say, “I’m interested in this piece. Could you send me a few more images?”

And maybe, if they’re local, drop in and see it.

I had an experience recently which really cemented my thinking around this.

About a year ago, I had an enquiry about a painting. There was a brief exchange about size and price, and then everything went quiet until about three weeks ago, when I was contacted again.

This led to a much longer exchange of emails where we talked about framing and hanging options and about wanting to see the piece in real life and meet me.

In the end, the collector drove up from London with his daughter. They came to my show in Tideswell and then to the studio the next day.

Now, this was exceptional. I don’t expect most people to travel that far to see a painting or meet the artist.

But it did clarify something for me.

Buying original artwork often involves more than seeing an image and clicking “shop now”. People may want a little more context. They may want to ask a question, see another photograph, understand the scale, or simply have a more direct connection with the person who made the work.

That doesn’t have to be a long or complicated process. For original artwork, that feels much closer to the real buying process.

So I keep coming back to this phrase:

Fit for purpose.

What is the thing for?

What does it actually need to do?

And what is the simplest, clearest, most appropriate way to make that happen?

This also links to something I’ve been thinking about more recently: the marketing and business expertise I’ve built over the last twenty or thirty years.

I have worked in sales and marketing. I have built and run a private psychotherapy practice. I have co-founded and run a psychotherapy training institute. I have developed and marketed art courses, workshops, coaching programmes and original paintings.

Across all of that, the question is often the same:

How do you offer something clearly, appropriately and sustainably, without building unnecessary machinery around it?

That is one of the areas where I can now offer useful support to other creative businesses.

You might be an artist, jeweller, ceramicist, course leader, coach, workshop facilitator, studio owner, or someone developing a creative service or product.

You might already have a business and want to look at what is working, what is not, and where the marketing or sales process has become unclear.

You might be setting something up and want to think through the right structure before you build something too complicated.

You might have one specific marketing question and want a focused session to talk it through.

I’m developing a few ways to work with me around this.

One is a focused marketing power session: an hour and a half where you bring a question, problem or decision and we work through it together.

Another is a fuller marketing clarity session for an existing creative business, where we look at your current offer, audience, messaging and sales pathway.

And another possibility is support for people setting up something new: thinking through what you actually need, what you don’t, and how to avoid building the aircraft carrier when a much simpler vehicle would do the job.

I rest my case

Because sometimes the most useful business question is not “What platform should I use?”

It is:

“What am I actually trying to make happen here?”

And then:

“What would be fit for purpose?”

If you’re running a creative business, or thinking about setting one up, and you’d like help thinking through your marketing, offer, sales pathway or systems, you’re welcome to contact me directly.

I’m currently developing a few ways to work with people on this. If this touches on something you’re wrestling with, send me a message and we can begin with a conversation.

While writing this, WordPress emailed to say a plugin had caused a critical error on my website.

I rest my case.

Yesterday I filmed part of a studio session while working on one of my larger oil paintings.

The reality of filming a painting session

It started as eighteen minutes of footage, which sounds as though it might be full of continuous painting action. In reality, over half of it was me disappearing out of shot, looking for materials I couldn’t find, clattering and banging, mixing paint somewhere off-camera, returning to make one small change, and then standing back again to look.

There is also, occasionally, the side of my head.

Which is probably a more accurate reflection than a more polished process video would be.

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Painting, for me, is rarely a steady sequence of clear decisions. It is much slower and less linear than that. There are moments of action, but they are held within much longer periods of looking, waiting, noticing and sensing what might need to happen next.

Working with charcoal, oil stick and paint

In this video, you’ll see me working on canvas with oil paint, charcoal and oil sticks. I begin with some charcoal drawing into the surface, then move between drawn marks, oil stick and mixed paint. The painting develops through layering, interruption and adjustment - a moment by moment reponse to my expereince of the painting as it evolves.

A lot of what is happening is not especially verbal. I am not standing there thinking, in a neat conscious way, “this area needs more weight” or “that line needs to move the eye across the surface.” Sometimes I can explain it afterwards, but in the moment it is much more intuitive. I am noticing my internal response to the painting. Does it feel balanced? Is my eye being caught somewhere? Has one area become too dominant? Does the painting feel as though it is opening up or closing down?

That kind of noticing is hard to film because, from the outside, it often looks like nothing is happening other than me standing staring.

But so much of painting happens in the pause before the next mark.

The pause before the next mark

The mark-making itself may only take a few seconds. The longer work is in sensing whether that mark is needed at all. There is a point in the video where I half-finish a sentence, stop, look again, and then come back to the thought later. That feels very close to what the painting process is like: something half-known, not yet clear enough to say, gradually becoming available through looking and doing.

This is why I think studio process is often more interesting than technique alone. Technique matters, of course. Materials matter. Knowing what charcoal, oil stick or paint can do gives me more possibilities to work with. But the real development of the painting comes through response: noticing, feeling an urge to do something, and then making the next small move.

This edited video is not a step-by-step demonstration. It is more of a glimpse into the rhythm of a painting session: looking, changing, interrupting, waiting, returning and responding.

Watch the process video

Creative Sparks begins in July

This is also close to the territory we’ll be exploring in Creative Sparks: 12 Days of Experimental Practice in July.

The challenge is designed to help you begin from small prompts and experimental actions. It is about noticing what happens when you follow a visual thread, test an idea, respond to materials and allow one thing to lead to another.

If you would like a structured but light-touch way to bring more experimentation into your own practice this summer, Creative Sparks begins with an introductory Zoom on Saturday 11 July, followed by daily prompts from 12–23 July and a wrap-up session on Friday 24 July.

You can find out more and join here:

https://linc-art.com/creative-sparks-12-days-of-experimental-practice/

I’m about nine years old and it’s time for my weekly clarinet lesson.

I’ve not practised. Again.

I know I’m going to be asked.

Mr Moran will say, “Lin, have you practised this week?” This will usually happen while I’m fumbling my scales or struggling to play that week’s piece.

And I’ll shift uncomfortably and say, “Not really.”

He’ll sigh and say, “You really need to, you know.”

And I’ll feel the familiar guilt and discomfort.

At that age, practising wasn’t fun. It wasn’t enjoyable. It felt like being banished into a room on my own to struggle with something I didn’t really understand.

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Expected to practise, but left alone with the struggle

There were arguments at home about it too. Mostly instructions to go and practise. Very little ongoing support or interest. The parent wanting to come and applaud at the concert, but not wanting to sit with me, while I made mistake after shrieky mistake on the journey towards that concert.

If practice is only framed as something you should do, or something you are failing to do, it can become loaded very quickly. It becomes associated with guilt, pressure, and the feeling of not being good enough yet.

Wanting to arrive too quickly

Fast forward a few decades and I’m a therapist.

I’ve taken my supervisory endorsement and I’m training to take my exam. And I’m struggling. I’ve had a couple of situations that were complex, demanding, and more difficult than they needed to be because of my inexperience.

Looking back now, I realise I needed more time as a clinician to build up a stronger bank of experience post-qualification. Those first few years of being a supervisor were quite fragile. Some of the things that happened came about because I had gone into it too quickly. I had not given myself enough time to build the skill and experience.

I think this is probably where this insight comes from.

It seems to me to be a very human thing to want to do something quickly. To want to move on. To arrive. To be competent. To get to the bit where we know what we are doing. To make the paintings we want to make.

What gets missed when we only celebrate outcomes

And I think we focus too much on achievement and not enough on the route to mastery.

I see this a lot with artists I teach and coach. People get frustrated with themselves because they are not able to master the skill of painting quickly. Or they resist the idea of developing a practice that supports skill over time.

There is a kind of lauding of the idea that it is good to be able to pick up a brush and just “do it”. And not just in art. We see it in sport, academia, creative work, business, probably everywhere.

But of course we can’t always just do it.

Very often we haven’t done the thing before, and some skills take time to learn.

I think this often starts in childhood. Many of us grow up with expectations that we should be able to do things quickly, or we have less than ideal experiences of what it means to practise something in order to gain skill.

My experience of the clarinet was one of these. Practice was not understood as a place where learning happened. It was a thing I was supposed to go away and do, so that I could perform better later.

What I can see now, is that there is a particular kind of loneliness in being expected to practise, but not being accompanied in the process.

It is no wonder many of us want to sidestep that process.

The parent wants the concert, the finished piece, the winning team, the medal. The moment of sitting in the audience and feeling proud. But they are not necessarily willing to sit through the scales. The wrong notes. The horrible clarinet shrieks. The stopping and starting. The football or hockey practice in the rain, getting up early to go to the pool for an early start. The bit where the child is frustrated, bored, ashamed, and not yet able to do the thing.

Practice is vulnerable. You are not good yet. You are trying to become good. You meet your own clumsiness again and again. If nobody is alongside you in that, the experience can become one of private failure rather than supported learning.

That is a very different thing.

Then later, when we go into the studio, we can find ourselves carrying that same atmosphere with us. We expect ourselves to go away and practise, but the internal voice beside us is not encouraging. It is impatient. It wants the concert. It wants the finished painting. It wants the evidence that we were worth applauding.

It does not want to sit with us while the work squeaks.

Not everyone can win the medal. But the commitment still matters.

That is the bit I feel often gets missed in the celebration of the outcome.

The slow and incremental changes. The tiny moments of success. The point where something that felt impossible becomes slightly less impossible. The moment where you notice your hand knows something it did not know last month.

That is where we could put more of our attention.

We are very good at recognising finished outcomes, visible success, and the moments where someone stands on the podium and is applauded.

We are less good at recognising what it takes to keep doing the thing.

To keep practising.

The promise and problem of shortcuts

And of course, what also colludes with this is the current fondness for hacks, quick fixes, and shortcuts.

Do these three things and make the art you’ve always wanted to make.

Now, I’m not completely against hacks. Jamie Oliver has some great ones. There are times when a practical shortcut is useful. I am not arguing for making everything harder than it needs to be. But I do get concerned about what hacks, shortcuts, and quick fixes are saying to us at a deeper level.

The underlying message is that speed and ease are a legitimate means rather than slow, steady depth and competence. That you can get to competence by taking shortcuts.

And I’m not sure you can.

I don’t think there is any substitute for learning, doing, and integration.

It feels to me that achievements and breakthroughs that come about through quick fixes don’t always stand on solid ground. There is important experience missing. Like my too-quick supervisory endorsement. It may have looked like the next stage, but there were parts of the foundation that were not yet strong enough.

I don’t believe shortcuts can replace the part of learning that comes from time spent in the thing.

There is a depth of knowledge and understanding that only comes from repeated contact. From doing it, noticing what happens, making mistakes, trying again, and gradually building an internal sense of how something works.

Someone else’s answer to the problem

And perhaps most importantly, learning how to problem-solve from inside the experience.

That is one of the things a hack can’t give you.

A hack is usually someone else’s answer to the problem. It may be useful. It may save time. It may show you a way through. But it does not necessarily help you develop your own judgement. It does not give you the experience of finding the answer yourself, from your own contact with the material, the process, the difficulty.

And that matters.

Because in art, as in most forms of deep learning, the aim is not only to solve this one problem. It is to become someone who can meet the next problem with more confidence, more curiosity, and more trust in your own capacity to work things out.

You cannot get that any other way.

And I think when we reach too quickly for shortcuts, we miss something fundamental.

We miss the experience of staying with something.

We miss noticing ourselves getting better.

Confidence with substance

We miss the experience of confidence growing through practice, not through performance.

That matters.

Because it gives you a grounded sense of yourself and your capacity to move towards mastery. Not mastery as a grand final arrival point. More the lived experience of becoming more capable.

When you live through practice, frustration, mistakes, breakthroughs, and slow change, you gain an experience that cannot be substituted.

You know something because you have lived it.

You know you can stay.

You know you can learn.

You know you can make decisions from a more solid place because you have built the experience underneath them.

If you take the shortcut, I think it can leave you never quite sure. Something remains uncertain. You might have reached the visible outcome, but you have not necessarily had the experience of becoming the person who can stand on that ground.

And I think that is what practice gives us.

Not just skill.

A relationship with our own capacity to learn.

If this is where you are in your own practice

This is exactly the kind of work we do in Directions in Abstraction.

The course is built around the idea that artists develop through practice, reflection, feedback, and repeated contact with their own work. Not through hacks. Not through copying someone else’s style. Not through being handed a set of clever tricks.

It gives you structure, teaching, and support while you build your own understanding of visual language, composition, materials, process, and decision-making.

If you are ready for that kind of deeper development, you can find out more here: https://linc-art.com/art-fluency/directions-in-abstraction/

Happening Soon

I’ll also be showing work again at Tideswell Studios on Saturday 20 and Sunday 21 June, open 10.30am–5.30pm both days.

This second Portfolio Show will include a different selection of work, including more recent acrylic-led pieces, smaller works, and framed pieces.

Works will be available to buy, and I’ll be there both days if you’d like to come and see the paintings in person. Click the link below for more.

Tideswell Studios, Derbyshire.

Packing for Art Break Through

Crates of paint. Boxes of tools. Containers of brushes. Drawing materials. Paper. Collage material. All the usual artist paraphernalia that seems entirely reasonable until you have to load it into a car.

I was getting ready to run Art Break Through, my annual three-and-a-half-day artist retreat. Each year I run it in a beautiful location, and it gives artists the chance to step away from their usual routines and take a deeper dive into their practice. Each year has a different focus, so artists can return annually and have a new experience each time.

I choose a theme – this year was Metaphor, Meaning and Symbolism – and then put together a series of exercises and exploratory experiences for the group to work through. They might spend half a day exploring one idea, then another half day approaching something from a different angle. After that, there are usually a couple of days for people to develop their own work, bringing in some of the learning, energy and discoveries from those first exercises.

I love teaching in this way. It is such a rich experience to spend three and a half days with a group of artists, working in person, watching things unfold, and seeing what happens when people have enough time and space to really engage with their work. There is also time for me to get to know them and their work properly, so the feedback can be specific, supportive and useful.

I often take some of my own work with me too. Not to demonstrate or take part in the same exercises as the group, because I don’t want to lead or influence what they might do. I prefer to keep that space clear, so people can respond in their own way.

But when everyone is absorbed in their own work, I sometimes have time to carry something of my own forward alongside them.

The practical problem

This year, that presented a practical problem.

Most of my recent work has been in oil paint, and there was no way I was going to pack wet oil paintings into the car and bring them home again. That felt like a disaster waiting to happen, and I’ve learned to spot some disasters before actively driving towards them.

So I started looking at what else I could take.

Returning to acrylic

I had some panels in the studio that I’d begun towards the end of last year. They were part-finished mixed media pieces, using acrylic paint, raw paper, canvas, and fabric that had been dyed or dipped in paint. I hadn’t abandoned them exactly, but I had moved away from that way of working.

At the time, I think I’d explored what I needed to explore. The work had reached a point where I knew what I was doing with it, and once that happens, my interest and engagement start to dip. When the questions have mostly been answered, there is less for me to discover.

And discovery is a large part of what keeps me engaged as an artist.

Recently, my oil paintings have taken me somewhere new. The underlying compositional structure has changed. Earlier work had been more concerned with space, edges, blocks of colour, transitions, and the ways different areas meet. The newer oil paintings have become much more vertical, or sometimes horizontal, with bands and stripes of colour that are then disrupted, broken, interrupted or pulled out of alignment.

So, as I looked at these older panels, I had a sudden thought.

I could take them with me. I could return to acrylic. And I could see what happened if I brought the newer stripe and band structures into the mixed media surfaces I had already begun.

That was the moment something clicked.

I packed the panels into the car feeling unexpectedly energised by the idea. There was something interesting in the possibility of combining those different threads: the raw paper, canvas and fabric; the painted and dipped surfaces; the more recent interest in vertical structure, bands of colour, disruption and interruption.

I didn’t know if it would work, but there was enough of a question there to make me want to find out.

And actually, it was something of a revelation.

Oil and acrylic behave differently….

The first thing was that familiar moment of remembering just how differently acrylic behaves from oil.

The viscosity is completely different. The tools don’t behave in the same way. The paint doesn’t move across the surface in the same way. The colour doesn’t mix in quite the same way either.

The principles of colour mixing are the same, of course: desaturation, using white and black, working with complementary colours, softening colour, creating harmony by bringing small amounts of one colour into another. But the feel of it is very different.

With oil paint, I notice that I can use more fully saturated colour. There is something about the depth and vibrancy of oil that allows those colours to hold their own. Acrylic can tip much more quickly into something too bright or garish for me, unless the colour is worked with quite carefully. I found myself really mixing again. Working the colour. Adjusting it. Softening it. Pulling it back. Looking for the particular note I wanted rather than taking the colour straight from the tube.

And the experience of paint moving on surface is very different too. With oil, I tend to work wet into wet, and there is only so far I can go before things begin to muddy. At a certain point, the paint starts mixing on the surface in a way that is no longer useful, and I have to stop. And then I have to stop for quite a long time, because the painting needs to dry. In my recent oil pieces, I’ve also been using oil sticks, which allow me to physically draw with sticks of paint. Lush.

Acrylic has a completely different rhythm.

You can put something aside for half an hour, come back to it, and dive straight back in. That creates a much faster movement between idea, action and response. The painting can progress quickly because the surface is ready for you again so soon.

But that speed is not automatically better.

One thing I value about oil is that it forces pauses. It makes me step back. It stops me from doing too much too quickly. There is thinking time built into the material, and although that can be frustrating, it can also be incredibly useful.

Acrylic gives me more immediacy. Oil gives me more interruption.

Both of those things affect the way a painting develops.

Keeping the enquiry alive

What feels significant about this is that, for the first time, I was able to move from one material system into another while staying inside the same body of enquiry.

That might sound like a small thing, but for me it isn’t.

In the past, switching from oil to acrylic, or from one kind of surface to another, has tended to send the work somewhere else. Not necessarily somewhere bad, but somewhere separate. The material would move the language so much that the original thread became difficult to hold.

This time, something different happened.

I could see how the ideas from the oil paintings might translate into these smaller acrylic mixed media pieces. Not by trying to imitate one material with another, but by understanding what needed to carry across and how: the vertical structures, the disrupted bands of colour, the broken edges, the surface friction, the layered history, the sense of things being built, scraped, interrupted and reworked.

The acrylic paintings needed different handling. They needed the fabric and paper underneath to create the depth and physicality that oil gives me in another way. They needed slower, more deliberate placement of colour. They needed different mark-making: less broad gesture, more pressure, placement and response. But they were still asking the same questions

.

That is the part that feels important.

After more than twenty years of painting, I could feel the continuity between the works. I could move fluidly between materials still connected to the line of enquiry.

That feels like a satisfying development in the work.

Material fluency

It speaks to something I think matters deeply in an artist’s practice: not just knowing how to use a material but developing a relationship with it. Understanding what it offers, what it resists, how it changes your pace, your decisions, your gestures, and the kind of surface you can build.

The more deeply we understand our materials, the more freedom we have. Not because we can make anything do anything but because we can work with their differences without losing ourselves in them.

For me, that was the revelation. Not simply that acrylic behaves differently from oil, but that I could now move fluently between them and keep the work alive.

Happening Soon

Tideswell Portfolio Show

My next event is the Tideswell Portfolio Show, where I’ll be bringing together a selection of recent paintings and mixed media work.

It feels like a good moment to show this work, especially as several strands of the studio practice are beginning to connect: the recent oil paintings, the smaller mixed media panels, the stripe structures, and the ongoing interest in surface, disruption and materiality.

The show will include a range of work, including some smaller pieces, so it’s a good opportunity to come and see what has been developing in the studio.

Dates:

Saturday 16 May
Sunday 17 May

Saturday 20 June
Sunday 21 June

Times

10.30am – 5.30pm both days.

Location

Tideswell Studios
High Street, Tideswell SK17 8LB

https://linc-art.com/news-events/

What the challenge involved

The structure was simple. Each person brought a small selection of studies, or one or two paintings they were happy to continue working into. It could be work they felt curious about, work that felt unfinished, or something they had become stuck with.

Each day, I sent out a prompt: a practical suggestion for the group to follow, alongside one or two reflective questions to help them notice more about their process. In the evening, we met for a short live session to discuss how the day had gone, what had been discovered, and what still felt sticky.

I’ll repeat the content of the challenge at the end of this article, for anyone who would like to try it with their own work.

But what interested me most, as an artist and teacher, was not simply the direction people took the work. It was what the process revealed about observation, intuition, uncertainty, the development of artistic judgement and how artists move from a felt sense of something towards visual decisions that can give it form.

Reading a painting has two parts

For me, reading a painting has two parts.

The first is observational. We look at what is actually there. What draws the eye? What dominates? What supports? Where is the movement? What feels unresolved? How are hierarchy, value, colour, scale and composition operating in the work?

These are important skills. They give us language and tools. Many courses, books and workshops quite rightly focus on them.

But I think technical observation only takes us so far.

The second part is where the artist’s own sensibility begins to come into the process.

It asks: how am I experiencing what I’m seeing and what meaning does this have for me? To get to this, developing good skills in reflection is key.

For example, how am I affected by the strong contrast? Does it give the painting energy, or does it feel too abrupt? Does this quiet area feel spacious, or does it feel empty? Does the central shape feel grounded, heavy, awkward, insistent, tender, unresolved? What do I feel when I look at this work, and what might that be telling me?

It is one thing to say, “This painting has a focal point.” It is another to ask, “How does the way the focal point is working, affect how I experience this painting? Does it support what I want the painting to express?”

The missing reflective step

This is why reflective questions are such an important part of my teaching and are built into all of my courses and challenges.

For some artists, recognising the nuances of their own experience is not familiar. Many people have been taught technical skills, but not necessarily the reflective habit of asking what their own response means. They may be able to name the compositional structure but still feel unsure how to use that information to make a decision that belongs to them.

This is where reading your own work becomes deeper.

You begin to connect what you see with how you experience it. You start to recognise what feels alive, what feels forced, what feels overworked, what feels unresolved, what feels promising but not yet fully formed.

From there, you can begin to make meaning from your response and use that meaning to guide your intentions and decisions.

In the live sessions, this showed up in the kinds of questions we returned to again and again.

With the work the artists brought to the group, the most useful questions were not usually, “How do I fix this?”

They were questions about attention.

What do I see first?

What keeps pulling my eye?

What supports the main movement?

What is competing?

What is unclear?

What changes when I step back, rotate the work, crop it, or look again after a pause?

A lot of the challenge was about practising these questions. Not because there is a “correct” answer, but to gather better information and deepen understanding.

What artists often get stuck with

Across the week, some familiar concerns appeared.

Artists were wondering what to do next, how to avoid overworking, when something might be finished, how to see what was already working, and how to move from individual pieces towards a clearer direction or body of work.

There was also the ordinary vulnerability of sharing work in progress. Even in a supportive group, it takes something to show work that feels uncertain, unresolved, or not yet fully understood.

These questions crop up again and again in the groups, courses and challenges I run. They are central concerns in the creative process.

During the week, we worked with ideas of hierarchy, support and focal point. We looked at how value, scale, colour, movement and distance affect how a painting is read.

Some people used cropping to find a stronger composition. Some simplified areas to clarify what mattered. Some tested changes digitally before touching the original work. Some made small deliberate experiments, then stepped back to see what had changed.

What mattered was not the particular method. It was the shift from reacting to observing, and from observing to making a more considered move.

What changed during the week

By the end of the challenge, people were reporting some useful developments.

Some felt less stuck. Some saw older work differently. Some found a possible way forward with pieces they had put aside. Some recognised more clearly what they wanted from the work. Several people noticed the value of making one move, stepping back, and allowing time before making the next.

There was also something important about the reflective process.

In the final session, people spoke about their work and had their words reflected back by others. That helped some participants hear their own thinking more clearly.

Sometimes another person does not need to give advice. They simply need to listen accurately enough for you to recognise what you already know.

Running the challenge confirmed something I return to often in my teaching. Artists need more than tips and techniques. They need ways of looking, language for what they are seeing, enough structure to support their process, and enough space to make their own decisions.

Reading your work more clearly does not remove uncertainty.

But it can make uncertainty more workable.

It gives you somewhere to begin.

Below is the five-day process if you would like to try it with your own work.

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Read Your Painting Challenge Five Days of Prompts

Day 1: Deepening Looking

Before making any changes, you may want to take a photograph of your studies so you have a clear record of where you started.

Teaching Note: This week starts by focusing on observing your work more deeply and strengthening your ability to notice what is happening in your paintings.

This is about taking time to be with your work—allowing yourself to look more fully—and beginning to develop a simple process for evaluating what you see.

When you do this, you start to understand the structure of your paintings before moving to any adjustments or improvements.

We’ll begin with the idea of hierarchy.
Every painting has a hierarchy: something leads, and something supports, creating a pathway for the eye.

Today is about noticing that as a first step.

Aim
Develop how you see structure and hierarchy.

Prompt / Exercise
Choose one study or painting to work from.

Place it somewhere you can see it clearly both close up and from around 3–4 feet away.

Take a few minutes to just look.
Allow your eyes to move around the piece naturally without analysing or naming anything straight away.

Once you feel you’ve really taken it in, begin to ask:

What is dominant? (What do your eyes return to first or most often?)

What supports it? (What sits around or alongside the dominant element?)

Make a few brief notes.

Question for Reflection

What did you notice about how your eye moved around the painting?

Did anything surprise you about what you noticed?

Day 2: Simplifying

If you haven’t already, you may wish to take a photograph of your work before making changes.

Teaching note: Today’s focus is on exploring clarity and simplicity.

This begins to move into artistic preference and sensibility. There isn’t a single correct level of simplicity in a painting—some work holds complexity well; some relies on reduction.

What we’re doing today is testing what happens when you remove rather than add, and how removal can change what is clearly seen. As you reduce what surrounds key elements, they become clearer and more focused.

If your work tends to revolve around a main idea, too many competing elements can sometimes make that less clear. Simplifying can help you see whether the structure strengthens when things are reduced.

The aim isn’t to make the work simpler as a rule, but to understand what simplification does to your painting.

Aim
Create clarity by removing.

Prompt / Exercise
Take the same study you looked at yesterday, or choose another.

Identify the main idea that is leading the painting.
Then look for elements that might be competing with or distracting from it.

Explore ways to simplify one area of the painting. For example:

reduce the number of marks

simplify or merge shapes

soften or lose some edges

Keep the changes contained rather than reworking the whole piece.

Question for Reflection
What effect did simplifying have—and did it move the painting in a direction you prefer?

Day 3: Strengthening Structure

Teaching Note:

Over the last two days you’ve been observing and testing what happens when you reduce elements within your painting.
Today shifts from testing to exploring what it’s like to make more definite decisions about hierarchy.

Every painting involves choices about what carries weight and what sits back. However, how that happens varies enormously.
In some work, hierarchy is very clear and direct. In other work, it may be subtle, dispersed, or held through repetition, rhythm, or material rather than contrast.

Today is not about applying a particular way of doing this. It’s about exploring what happens when you make a more definite decision about what matters in your painting, and how you allow the rest of the work to relate to that.

Aim
Make clearer decisions about what carries the painting.

Prompt / Exercise
Work with your existing study, or choose something new for today.

Spend a moment noticing where the weight or emphasis currently sits in the painting. This may be held in one area, or across several elements in relationship.

Now explore making one or two more definite decisions about that.

For example, you could:

increase or decrease contrast (value)

adjust scale or proportion

shift the emphasis of a particular area

clarify or redistribute attention across the surface

As you do this, notice what happens across the rest of the painting. What shifts in response? What else might need to adjust?

Keep the changes focused rather than reworking the whole painting.

Question for Reflection
What did you notice when you made a more definite decision about emphasis?

Day 4: Experimenting Deliberately

Teaching note: Experimentation is more likely to be effective when it’s deliberate rather than random.

Rather than adding arbitrary changes, you are introducing something specific to see how the painting responds. For example, this might be a different kind of mark, a change in light/dark, something that unsettles the current balance slightly.

Today is about testing what the painting can hold, and noticing what opens up when that balance is disturbed.

Aim
Introduce risk with intention, not chaos.

Prompt / Exercise
Work with your existing study.

Introduce one new or contrasting element into the painting. This could be:

a different kind of mark

a shift in value

a new shape or interruption

Let it create some tension or movement.

As you do this, notice how the rest of the painting responds. What shifts? What holds? What feels under pressure?

Keep the change focused rather than reworking the whole painting.

Question for Reflection
What did this change open up in the painting?

Day 5: Review and Consolidation

Teaching Note: This final day is about taking what you’ve explored this week and beginning to place it within your own way of working.

Rather than treating these exercises as separate, consider how what you’ve noticed might fit with your process—how you look, how you respond, and how your work develops over time.

The aim is not to arrive at a fixed method, but to recognise what has been useful and how it might support the way you bring intention into your work.

Aim
Reflect on what has been useful and begin to integrate it into your own process.

Prompt / Exercise
Compare your starting images with your current versions.

Write a short note:

What has changed?

What did you do to create that change?

Question for Reflection
What have you learned this week that you want to carry forward into your practice?

What are you now noticing that you weren’t seeing before?

Creative Play Lab

Next week I’ll be writing more about creative play with some thoughts on why it matters in an artists practice. Creative Play Lab is my online downloadable course for artists who want to explore play as part of a deeper, more reflective studio process.

I posted a note last week about how I’ve not been painting. In fact, the last time I had any serious painting time was probably mid-February. This hasn’t been a deliberate break, more time slipping away while other things took priority.

Don’t get me wrong — I have been into my studio, but only in bits and pieces. A few random moments with collage. An hour or two here and there. Some looking. Some thinking. An awareness of the paintings sitting there, waiting to be worked on. Underneath all this, a thrum of dissatisfaction that my energy and motivation weren’t in the right place to dive back into the latest series of work.

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And, interestingly, a resurgence of an old familiar feeling: that I wasn’t getting to do the thing I really wanted to do.

Every time I looked at the pieces hanging on the wall, I’d feel a momentary flicker of interest, and then it would rapidly drop away or be taken over by the list of other things waiting in the wings.

So, not much painting.

A lot of this has simply been life. Along with running a busy teaching practice, I’ve had time away. A holiday. Preparing the house to go on the market, with all the sorting, clearing, decision-making and general domestic excavation that involves. Supporting elderly family members has been part of that picture too.

None of it dramatic in itself, but all of it taking up space.

Not Much Painting

And then, I began to pay attention to something else.

What had started as a genuine lack of capacity, was also tapping into an old pattern of mine: working hard not to get what I want.

The teaching, coaching, course preparation and general running-the-business side of my work had started taking first place. I’d got into the habit of thinking, “I’ll just get all of that done first, then I’ll go and paint.”

Which, as any self-employed artist knows, is a cast iron way of making sure the painting never happens.

There is always another email. Another page to update. Another bit of preparation. Another job to do.

It’s been there in my writing too. The last longer piece I posted was at the end of March, and here we are on 20^th April. That’s not a huge gap in the grand scheme of things, but it tells its own story. With writing, it feels less like delaying something and more that I simply haven’t had the headspace to think or write with any depth. My capacity over the last few weeks has been more depleted than I perhaps realised.

An Old Pattern

In Transactional Analysis, this kind of pattern is called a process script: the familiar way old script decisions get acted out in daily life, often so automatically we barely notice them. If you’re newer here and want more of the TA background, I’ve written about script before in What a Creative Life Can Teach Us and across the Alex series.

For me, this particular pattern is “Until”: I can’t rest, or paint, or do the thing I most want to do until everything else is done first.

Which is, of course, impossible.

And it tends to get reactivated at exactly the times when life feels big and my resources are lower. With a house move, course launches, a new studio, and a business to keep building while all this is happening, that feels more or less where I am now.

So with that awareness, I decided I just needed to go and paint.

Back Into the Studio

But then when I walked into the studio, the space felt odd.

Not exactly wrong, but not quite mine either. A bit out of kilter. A little unfamiliar. More like a storage room than a place where work gets made.

This is a room I’ve used as a studio before, so I’d assumed it would feel the way it used to. But it didn’t. I’d moved my materials back up there several weeks ago and had already half-forgotten where I’d put things. I spent a ridiculous amount of time hunting around for bits of equipment that had apparently disappeared into the ether.

But it was more than that.

I think the space felt unfamiliar because I had become slightly unfamiliar to the work.

When you step away from the studio for a while, the connection between you and the paintings loosens. It doesn’t completely disappear, but as your attention moves elsewhere, it goes into the background. Whatever is urgent, practical, emotional or necessary takes up the foreground while the work waits.

So the first part of returning was about looking. Walking in. Letting my eye rest on the unfinished pieces. Seeing where my attention landed. What felt interesting.

I looked at a couple of paintings and thought I might want to work on them. I placed them on my table, ready to start, and then realised I didn’t. Nope. Not quite right today.

Then one canvas called to me quite clearly.

It was a reworking of a painting from some time ago, and almost immediately I knew that was where I wanted to begin. This kind of instinctual moment is often very clear to me. It’s a felt sense of deep agreement that this is the direction to go in. And I usually trust it and don’t second-guess it.

Finding My Way Back In

What surprised me was how quickly I found my way back in.

I’ve been working with stripe-based structures, and when I was last in the studio properly they still felt quite new. I was working them out as I went along, trying to understand how this new idea in my painting was going to work.

This time, they felt more familiar.

Not completely resolved. There’s still plenty to explore. But the underlying ideas now felt more known. As if they had still been settling somewhere in the background, even though they hadn’t been at the forefront of my mind.

What Was Happening Underneath

It made me think about incubation, though this didn’t feel like the kind of incubation I usually recognise. Sometimes when I step back from a body of work, I know I’m allowing something to settle. There is a deliberate pause. A consciousness to the space.

This wasn’t that.

I’d been distracted. Busy. Preoccupied. My head had been full of houses, family, admin, course delivery and all the other bits of life that don’t politely wait outside the studio door.

And yet something does seem to have been happening underneath.

So perhaps incubation doesn’t always announce itself as incubation. Perhaps sometimes the work continues to organise itself in the background, even when we are not giving it much direct attention.

When I began painting again, I noticed I was pushing the compositions beyond the stripe forms I’d been exploring before. There was still a relationship to the earlier pieces, but something new was starting to happen.

Fresh colours came in quickly.

Celadon with soft pink in one large square piece. Deep umber, blue and orange in another. Combinations I wasn’t planning, but which felt immediate and interesting once they arrived.

Will they stay?

Who knows.

But for now, they feel alive enough to follow.

What Was Happening Underneath

And that felt like the real return. Not walking into the room and expecting everything to feel as it had before, but accepting the awkwardness, the slight distance, the rummaging around for missing tools, and the fact that a loosened connection was re-forming.

Because that, I think, was the thing I needed to understand. Yes, an old “Until” script had been helping to keep me from the work. But the work itself had not gone dead in the meantime. Something had still been developing underneath all that distraction and delay.

So, for now, I’m following that. Not with a big declaration or a plan. Just by going back in, looking again, and picking up the thread where it seems to be available.

Happening Soon

I’ve got two small gallery shows coming up at Tideswell Studio — on 16/17May and one later in the summer 20/21 June. They’re part of this transition before my move, and will be a chance to see a mix of older and more recent work in person before I leave the area. More details soon.

Expert in Process not Practice

It’s a few years ago and I’m attending a professional exam workshop in Utrecht. There’s a group of about 20 people from across Europe – Italy, France, the UK, Germany, Switzerland. It’s a light, bright room and I’m preparing for my Teaching and Supervising Transactional Analyst (TSTA) exam. As a group, we’re talking about one of the elements of the exam, which is supervising somebody outside your field of expertise.

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We are all feeling a little apprehensive about how this might work. We are all experts in our own application and wondering how it’s going to feel to be faced with someone who brings a question about a subject we don’t know. Transactional Analysis covers a range of applications—it’s used with children and adults in education, in organisational development, as well as psychotherapy and coaching—which means that in the exam you could be asked to do your live mentoring piece with someone from any of those fields.

Bringing it into Art Education

But why is this the case? And why is it relevant to artists? Just stay with me for another paragraph or two and I’ll tell you.

As a TSTA you are considered to be an expert in teaching, training, and supervising (mentoring), which means you should be able to do this across different fields. The qualification isn’t about your specific subject expertise; it’s about your understanding of the supervisory and training process and your ability to step outside your subject and operate from a meta perspective of how to teach, supervise, and train others to do so.

So, let’s consider how this is relevant to artists.

What we are looking at is the difference between someone who is an expert in the teaching and learning process and someone who is an expert in their own—in this instance, artistic—practice. If you are qualified in adult education, you are likely to have expertise in areas like how to teach, how adults learn, how to develop a curriculum, and how to work with groups. The expertise is in the process, and that crosses subjects.

So, for example, I feel confident that I could mentor someone who is not an artist in how to teach. They could be a graphic designer, a photographer, a ceramicist. This is because the focus is not on the content of what is being taught, but on how people learn and develop, and how we support that. It is about questions such as what people need to experience, think about, and understand in order to become competent. Those questions shape the structure of learning, rather than defining a fixed body of content.

But, in art education, there is a strong history of the master–apprentice model, which is firmly situated in the expert in their field approach. Going back through history, students would enter the studio of a master artist, apprentice themselves to that artist, and remain there sometimes for years. They would mix paint, assist in the production of works, and learn the craft by following the master’s process. We can still see versions of this today in courses where an artist shares their process, their expertise, and how they do things, with the expectation that students will learn by following that approach and eventually diverge. Walking around museums, you often come across paintings where the notes say the artist was from the school of a particular painter, and you can see the influence in the work.

When the teacher isn’t there

If you follow a lot of artists, as I do, it’s not unusual to see groups of people who have just completed a workshop, often holding up paintings that are recognisably in the style of the artist who taught them. Everyone looks happy. The work looks resolved. And of course, it’s lovely to see people feeling satisfied with what they’ve made. I have been that artist—the enjoyment of attending a workshop and making a painting that works.

But what I also found was that once I returned to my own studio, I might have taken some ideas from the workshop, but as soon as I reached a point where I needed to make decisions, I would get stuck. Without the artist there to show me how they would resolve the issue, I was left to make my own decisions. There would inevitably be a mismatch. I didn’t yet know enough to resolve the painting in the way they would and resolving it in my own way meant I was no longer following the process I had been given.

What This Approach Offers—and Where It Falls Short

This, for me, is one of the big limitations of this way of teaching. Once the student leaves the workshop, the external reference point is no longer available. It means the responsibility for decision-making returns to them, often before they have developed the confidence or understanding to carry it.

There are, of course, clear strengths in this model. It offers immersion in a way of working and a direct transmission of how to approach practice. It can quickly build confidence, particularly for newer artists, as they often leave with completed work they feel good about. It’s a little like taking part of the artist into yourself, carrying them with you and using them as a form of scaffolding and structure.

Supporting Independent Thinking

Which brings me to another key point I want to make about teaching, and that is the importance of having a guiding value or principle underpinning your approach. For me that is autonomy, here’s a slightly formal definition, our capacity to make informed decisions and act independently, not reliant on external direction. In the case of artists, autonomy is about moving towards making work that is fundamentally our own.

The difficulty I have with the above approach is twofold. Firstly, it comes from a different set of values about how learning takes place, one that is fundamentally about master and apprentice, expert and follower. And secondly, I’ve always felt it doesn’t support autonomy. When we use someone else’s way of working we are not using our own thinking and artistic ideas. As a result, our artistic autonomy may be delayed.

At some point any artist who has a strong desire to make their own work, to find their voice, or, my preferred description, who is seeking autonomy in their work, will have to find a way to let go of the artist’s process they’ve borrowed, and find their own.

Teaching Towards Autonomy

I think what this also highlights is what do you think is the most effective way to support people’s development towards autonomy and mastery? Is it through following an expert, learning all you can from them and then developing your own ideas later? Or is it through developing independent thinking from the outset.

When I share or demonstrate my own process, I am usually using it as an illustration of something rather than as a model to follow, and I’m always thinking, how does this support this individual to develop their own ideas. What guides me more are questions such as: how do I support people to become the best artist they want to be? That shifts the focus towards what people need to do, practise, and experience—the things they need to see, feel, and reflect on to grow their skills and capacity to move closer to autonomy.

With artistic autonomy as my value, it leads to a broader set of principles underpinning the teaching. I work from theoretical frameworks about how people learn, and I structure experiences so that participants do something, reflect on it, and develop their understanding through that process. Whether I am teaching a small technique or designing a larger course, I am looking at the learning process as a whole rather than starting from specific art content.

Overall, I’d describe this approach as being less about breaking down how I do something and more about supporting people to discover and give voice to their own artistic sensibility, understanding and judgement. I have always felt that it is through discovering our own ideas that growth happens.

The Challenge of Not Knowing

Of course, this approach also has its limitations. Artists may struggle with knowing enough to find their own way. They may not have the confidence to express themselves. As a teacher, I’m always mindful of how to balance instruction with supporting individuals to develop their own route. Newer artists often just don’t know enough or have had enough experience to have a sense of their own preferences. Without that balance, the question of finding one’s own way can feel intimidating, particularly in the early stages when experience is still limited. The most difficult part is often staying with uncertainty and not knowing and being willing to work through that until something begins to emerge.

What Sits Underneath Your Teaching?

If you’re teaching, it’s worth taking some time to be clear about what sits underneath your approach. What do you believe is most important in how people learn? What are you aiming for in the people you teach? You might agree with me, you might not, and I’m genuinely interested in that conversation. But having a clear value or principle that you’re working from gives your teaching coherence. It shapes the decisions you make, the structure you create, and the way you respond in the moment. Without it, it’s easy to default to habit or imitation. With it, there is a clearer sense of why you are doing what you are doing.

Happening Soon

The next Art Break Through workshop is at the end of April.

This is a 3½ day immersive workshop exploring how meaning emerges in your work through symbol, metaphor and material process. We’ll look at how artists work with imagery both consciously and intuitively—making deliberate choices, while also allowing meaning to unfold through the act of making.

Across a series of structured exercises, discussion, and extended studio time, you’ll develop new work and deepen your understanding of how your ideas, materials and visual language carry meaning.

This is about strengthening your ability to make decisions in your own work and to understand what you’re doing and why.

The workshop is designed for artists at different stages—from those developing their practice to those looking to refresh and extend an established way of working.

There are a few places still available.

Art Break Through: 2026 Edition: Symbol, Metaphor and Meaning

The Begining

During Covid I started running an online art course. Like many people, I found myself inventing new ways of working because so much of what normally held us up simply disappeared. Art was part of that too. During those years we all noticed how important it was to link up and connect with colleagues and friends online, because it was all that was available.

Before lockdown I’d been teaching face-to-face one- and two-day workshops exploring abstraction, and I’d been enjoying the process of bringing my teaching experience into art education. My initial concept was simple: to try out some ideas that had been in my mind for a while, to teach important concepts I didn’t feel were well covered in many of the workshops I’d taken myself, to offer connection to fellow artists when we were missing that in day-to-day life, and to test formats and approaches I already knew worked in other settings.

The Art Group Sessions were intended to be a bit like going to a local art group, where you focus each session on one particular topic. I ran a series of ten sessions covering visual language, composition, and intuition. You could sign up for one, or sign up for all, with a different topic each time. I also brought in my experience as a psychotherapy trainer, using approaches to teaching groups online that I knew were effective: teaching live to a small group, using breakout rooms, and building reflective prompts and discussion into the arc of the session alongside demonstration teaching.

Very quickly I ran into the practical problem of how to demonstrate and teach at the same time. Trying to paint and explain simultaneously splits your focus — a bit like rubbing your head, patting your stomach, and jumping up and down all at once. I moved to recording demonstrations and teaching live over the video instead. That way I could answer questions as they arose, pause when we needed to look more closely, and stay fully focused on teaching the group.

The 10-Week Course

Over the weeks those sessions ran, around 20–30 people joined across the different topics. Their success got me thinking about a longer, more coherent programme, and that was the beginning of Directions in Abstraction.

For the next three years I ran Directions in Abstraction as a 10-week course. It combined recorded demonstrations with live teaching over the top, and a lot of group work. I always kept the groups small — never more than 15–20 people — because one of my underlying principles is to teach through relationship. To do that, I need to know people and understand what they’re trying to achieve by coming on the course.

Teaching the programme was iterative. Over time I would notice where something needed more depth, where content needed adjusting, or where a piece wasn’t landing and needed changing. The feedback was consistently useful. One theme came through again and again, in both feedback and my own observation: people wanted longer. There was a lot in the course, and many felt they didn’t have enough time each week to work through the exercises, respond to the prompts, and integrate what they were learning. It all felt too quick.

The Lightbulb Moment

A comment from someone on the 2024 course crystallised it for me. They said they’d really like a year to be able to do this. It was a lightbulb moment: why on earth wasn’t I offering it over a year? With a programme like this — one where transformational learning takes place — people need time. If you’re going through a learning process that unsettles everything you thought you knew about how you make your art, it takes time to reformulate knowledge, skills, and confidence. When you learn a whole load of new information, you need time to integrate it, bring it into practice, consolidate it, and build on it.

A Year of Structured Development

In September 2024 I launched Directions in Abstraction as a 10-module programme running over a year, offered either one-to-one or in a group format. From my perspective, having that time to spend with the work — in a way many people haven’t had before — has a huge impact on what becomes possible. You don’t just have a week to try a few exercises and watch a couple of videos before the next module arrives. Instead, you have a whole month. A month to look, do, practise, think, try again, revisit, and watch again if you want to. Then you bring what you’ve done to a group session or a one-to-one session, so you have multiple opportunities to explore that month’s topic before moving on.

What Changes for Artists

When I look back across the feedback from Directions in Abstraction, a few themes repeat. People talk about the rhythm and structure of the programme as a turning point: it creates momentum, and it gives them enough space to practise, revisit ideas, and integrate what they’re learning rather than rushing on. They also describe learning to see their work differently — becoming more fluent in visual language like composition, value, hierarchy, line, and layering — so they can make more intentional decisions inside a painting. Alongside that, there’s a shift in self-trust: more permission to experiment, less overthinking, and a growing ability to diagnose what’s happening in the work without relying on external approval. The small-group format matters too. People value painting alongside others, the quality of the discussions, and the specific, non-judgemental feedback that helps them move work forward and learn from each other. The overall picture is not just learning techniques, but learning how to sustain a practice and develop as an artist.

Directions in Abstraction begins again in a few weeks towards the end of April.

If you’d like to understand the structure and content in more detail, you can download the prospectus here.

If you’re wondering whether the one-to-one or group format would suit you better, you’re welcome to arrange an informal conversation and we can talk it through.

What follows is a repost of this week’s Insights from the Studio, a shorter note I usually send to my mailing list. These studio reflections tend to circle around something practical or process-based — in this case, finding my way back into the work by simply cutting up some paper. It sits alongside Monday’s longer piece about not forcing things when you’re not in the mood. Perhaps the two together make a useful pairing.

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From time to time I’ll share these shorter studio notes here at the weekend. The main Substack essays generally arrive earlier in the week and take a broader look at teaching, learning, and the realities of building a painting practice.

Gentle Return

Yesterday afternoon I found my studio again.

Nothing dramatic – just me, a paper trimmer, and a fun pile of different papers spread out over the table. Pastel paper in rich colours. Smooth, creamy cartridge paper. Cheap white drawing sheets. Some heavier mixed media stock. A few gel-plate printed collage papers.

I’m trimming them down and gathering them into a ring-bound sketchbook to take on holiday. Part journal, part diary of the trip, part sketchbook, part record of what I’m looking at as we go. I’ll drop in one or two of those printed collage pages as little surprises – more like dividers than working pages. I’ve learnt that pre seeded pages are an interruption and they pull me away from what I really want, which is a simple blank surface I can respond to. In the end, I like a clean page best.

The Energy Shift

What’s I have been noticing as I’ve been doing this, is how quickly my energy shifted, my shoulders dropped and I felt myself give a big exhale as I began to sort.
On the surface, I’m just slicing paper. But it doesn’t feel small. It feels like I’m turning back towards my practice – reaching out and touching it again after a few weeks of being immersed in other things.
Because it has been a few weeks.

Disruption and Distance

The last couple of months has been full-on: recruiting for Directions in Abstraction, getting the online exhibition up and running on my website and – in the background – a house reorganisation as we edge closer to moving to Lancaster. The studio has swapped with the office, the office has swapped with the back bedroom, and at various points there have been boxes, tools, and half-moved furniture in every direction.

All of that has been necessary, but it has also been disruptive. I haven’t really known where anything is. The walls only recently have work back up on them. And every time I’ve thought, “It would be nice to do a bit of painting or sketching,” it’s been followed by the feeling that I simply don’t have the energy to even start.

So I didn’t. For about three weeks.

Starting Small
What I’m connecting with again today is that “starting” doesn’t have to mean launching into a big painting session. Sometimes it can be a small, practical move that gets you physically near your materials again – trimming paper, sharpening a handful of pencils, clearing a space on the table.
As I line up each sheet under the trimmer, I can feel that part of me waking up:
“Oh yes. This. This is familiar. This is important.”

The holiday sketchbook will end up holding all sorts – drawings, colour notes, little bits of writing, scrappy observations that may or may not go anywhere. But before any of that, the simple act of making it has already done an important job. It’s reminded me that my creative life is still here, even when my days are full of other demands. I just needed a doorway back in.

If you’ve had a gap from your own work – because life has been busy, or the studio’s in chaos, or you’re simply tired – it might be worth asking:
What’s my smallest doorway?
Not “What’s the next big project?” but “What’s the tiniest step that would bring me into contact with my materials again?”

It might be sorting paper. It might be putting three colours of paint on a tray, or taping a fresh sheet to the wall, or packing a pencil case ready for a train journey.
Whatever it is, it doesn’t have to be impressive. It just has to be real. And sometimes, that’s all it takes to remember: oh yes – I’m an artist, and this matters to me.

This morning I sat down to think about this week’s Substack and my mind went, as it often does, to teaching. I found myself re visiting thoughts I’ve been having for a while about different strands in art education:

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• Art as a form of entertainment – the learn to do/café workshops, the “come to Greece and do watercolour” holidays, the joyful afternoons of making where the point is really the experience.

• Artist as expert in their own process – the “come and learn my way of working” strand, not unlike the old master–apprentice model. For centuries, art education was apprenticeship. You learned the master’s technique. You ground pigments, copied drawings, absorbed their way of seeing where you learn by mirroring the teacher’s technique.

• Academic routes – the degree/MFA world, where you develop a body of work and learn to talk and write about it using particular forms of critical language and theory.

• And then the other category that a few of us seem to sit in these days: process-driven, facilitative, developmental courses that aren’t entertainment, aren’t “artist as expert in their own process” and aren’t academic in the traditional sense either.

I thought, maybe that’s this week’s post.
I started to sketch it in my head. I could already feel it turning into a decent length piece, an interesting mix of history, examples, and critique.

And then as I sat down with a cup of tea, and began to write I realised: I really didn’t have the energy for that. Not this week. The content felt flat, I was repeating things I’d said previously. What had seemed interesting felt dry and even a bit boring. No spark.

I knew I could push though. But the process would be a lifeless struggle and the piece unlikely to improve. If I was feeling stale before I began, 1500 words later it was unlikely to get much better.

And that, of course, took me straight to painting.

The Temptation to Push Through

Most of us know the feeling of being up against a deadline with a painting.

You’ve said yes to an open studios event, an exhibition or a submission date.. There are one or two pieces that are nearly there. If you had a clear day, or even a clear morning, you could probably resolve them. Instead, you’ve had a week of life happening at full volume and by the time you reach the studio you’re already running on fumes.

In that state, it’s very easy to default to “finishing mode”:

• reaching for the mark you always reach for when you’re stuck

• adding the extra layer because that’s what has worked before

• tidying and correcting rather than really seeing what’s in front of you

You can get something done like this. You can meet the deadline. Sometimes that’s necessary – galleries and open calls don’t always wait for our best energy.

But I think most of us can tell the difference between:

• a painting that has reached a resolution through enough attention and curiosity, and

• a painting that’s been arm-wrestled over the line by habit and willpower when the juice just isn’t there.

The first might be hard work, but it usually has life.

The second can be more like filling space. The moves are right, but the painting isn’t really listening any more. We’ve slipped into repeating ourselves.

I could feel that same pattern lining up this morning with the art-education essay. I knew I could pad it out. I knew I could make 1,500 words happen. But in my gut it felt like one of those late-stage paintings where you’re mostly throwing familiar ideas at a new situation.

When Life is Full

Part of what sits underneath this for me at the moment is simply capacity.

Off to one side of the studio there is: family health stuff, a house sale, carpets to choose, someone else’s house move to support, office and studio moves to finish, a business to run, courses to recruit for and a temporary fourth dog in the mix. None of it is dramatic in itself, but together it’s a lot.

Given all of that, the idea that I should also be able to produce a well-thought-through essay on the structures of art education on cue starts to look faintly ridiculous.

And yet this is often the expectation we hold for ourselves, isn’t it?
“Show up consistently. Keep producing. Don’t drop the ball.”

I’m all for showing up. A lot of my work rests on that belief. There is something to be said for continuing to turn towards the work even when we’re not in the mood. But there’s a point where “showing up” slides into “forcing it”, and that’s when we’re operating on autopilot.

You can possibly finish something from that place.
It’s unlikely it will feel enlivening.

Permission to Leave It

So instead of pressing on with the longer teaching piece, I’ve decided to do something different this week: I’m leaving it.

Not abandoning the questions – I’m still interested in how we teach, and why certain models feel more or less legitimate now, especially in the light of all the talk about “authenticity”. I’m just not trying to turn that particular tangle of thoughts into a substantial essay while my system is already full.

In a way, this little note is the Substack equivalent of putting a painting to one side and saying:

“Not today. I’ll come back to you when I’ve got more to bring than old moves and tiredness.”

And that is okay.
No drama, no big story about being blocked, just a factual:

“There isn’t much juice this week. I’m not going to pretend there is.”

A Small Invitation

If there’s a reflective question in all of this, it might be this:

• Where, in your own practice, are you tempted to push something over the line because you feel you should – even though it’s lost its freshness and energy?

• And what happens when you experiment with not doing that?

Sometimes we do have to meet the deadline and send the work, imperfect as it is. Life and contracts and opportunities don’t always align with our energy cycles.

But sometimes we don’t.
Sometimes it’s entirely possible to skip a week, hold a painting back, or leave a piece of writing as a set of notes in a folder.

This week, for me, is one of those times.

So, no big, fully formed article on art education - instead a sharing of some thoughts on permission not to.
A reminder that not every week has to be a week of finishing, and that creativity can’t always be summoned by effort alone.

I’ll be back to the teaching questions when there’s more space.
But, for now, this is enough.

Happening Soon

Directions in Abstraction – 1:1 spaces open

If this note about not forcing it has landed with you and you’re ready for something more structured, Directions in Abstraction is my ten-month programme for artists who want to deepen their visual language, build a coherent body of abstract work, and understand why their paintings work (or don’t) rather than follow step-by-step projects.

We work together via regular Zoom sessions, structured modules and practical exploration, with individual feedback on your paintings as they develop.

If you’d like details of the next intake, you can read the prospectus link below, or just hit reply and say you’re interested in DIA and I’ll send you the information.

Directions in Abstraction Prospectus

I can very clearly remember one of the early times I taught a subject I didn’t yet feel fully at home with.

With new material I have a habit of over-preparing, and this time was no exception: pages of notes, a detailed handout, and a timetable that broke the day down into carefully timed segments. I knew exactly what I was going to say, when I was going to say it, and which slide or demo came next.

Of course, the group hadn’t read my timetable.

Within the first hour, people were asking great questions that took us off my neat track. One or two needed more time with the first exercise. Someone else raced ahead. As always, the teaching started to take on its own life once the material met the group.

Nothing catastrophic happened. From the outside it all worked fine. The structure did its job as my safety net and scaffolding that sits in the background. Over the years it has become less and less of a script I have to drag everyone through.

If the conversation looks as though it’s drifting too far from the core theme, or I feel a flicker of uncertainty about what’s needed next, I glance back at my notes. They’re a reminder of the spine of the session – a way to reorient, not a set of rails I’m obliged to stick to.

So, full disclosure: I still have this tendency. When I taught a session recently on Joan Mitchell, I turned up with something like eleven pages of notes. The difference now is that I’ll name it. I’ll say to the group, “You’ll be pleased to know I’m massively over-prepared,” we have a laugh, and then we move into discussion. The notes sit there as back-up rather than a script I have to stick to. That’s really the shift: from using structure to control my nerves, to using it as a support while I pay attention to what’s actually happening in the room.

It was an early reminder – and an ongoing one – that the real teaching happens somewhere between our carefully written plans and the people actually in the room.

How do we help artists become teachers?

Over the last while, something quite specific has been knocking on the studio door.

In addition to painting and running courses, there’s the question of how we can best help artists become effective teachers.

Anyone who’s read my recent Substack pieces will know I have ideas about what helps people learn and what doesn’t. Years of teaching adults, running groups, supervising, and designing programmes (both in psychotherapy and art) have left me with a real passion for good teaching – the kind that is thoughtful, boundaried, and genuinely supportive of learning.

So the idea that’s forming is this: what if I created a small, focused pilot programme for artists who want to teach, mentor, or run their own courses?

I know that among the people who follow my work, some of you are:

• already teaching a little and want to feel more confident and grounded in how you do it, or

• carrying an idea for a course or workshop, but feeling unsure how to shape it, market it, or hold the space once people actually arrive.

It’s made me realise that a big part of my background – years of working with adult learners and training practitioners – is something I haven’t yet brought into Art Fluency in a dedicated way. I work with you as artists all the time… but some of you are also becoming teachers, guides, and facilitators yourselves.

And that feels like an exciting next layer.

What I’m thinking about offering

I’m considering a small pilot programme, more like a working group than a big course, for artists who want to:

• develop or refine a course, workshop, or ongoing programme

• feel more confident about how to teach, coach, and hold a group

• get some grounded support with the practical side of setting it up and sharing it with the world

In essence, we’d look at things like:

• shaping your idea into something teachable (who it’s for, what it does, how it’s structured)

• group process and facilitation – how to hold a room (or a Zoom), encourage participation, and manage tricky moments

• critique and feedback – how to support people honestly and kindly, without rescuing or sugar-coating

• setting exercises and building a learning journey rather than a random collection of activities

• working one-to-one alongside group work, if that’s part of your offer

• the basics of contracts, boundaries, and expectations

• the “how do I actually sell this?” bit – key message, who you’re talking to, and simple, realistic routes to market

I’m imagining each session as having three parts: a short, focused piece of teaching from me on a specific theme (for example, group process, setting exercises, or feedback); a discussion where we unpack how that lands in your contexts; and then a practical element where one or two people bring something to work on. That might be presenting your course idea, walking us through a lesson plan, getting us to do one of your exercises, or trying a short bit of live teaching. Over the course of the programme, everyone would have several opportunities to “step up to the front”, practise, and receive grounded feedback.

We’d probably meet over six months, with time between sessions for you to work on your own material and come back with questions and drafts.

This would be a paid pilot, not a free beta, but those in the first round would be joining at around two-thirds of the eventual price in exchange for helping me shape the format and for offering feedback along the way.

I’m imagining a group of around 4–6 people, so there’s space for proper conversation and individual attention.

Is this Tugging at you?

At this stage I’m in the “thinking it through with a cup of tea” phase rather than the “here is a shiny sales page” phase.

If you’re reading this and feeling a little tug – even if you’re not sure your idea is “ready” yet – I’d like to know.

If you’re interested, you can reply to this post or message me and tell me:

• what kind of course / workshop / programme you think you might want to run (even if it’s still vague), and

• what you’d most hope to get from being in a group like this.

Once I have a sense of who’s putting their hand up, I’ll shape the details and come back to you with dates, format, and price so you can decide properly.

It’s Sunday morning. I’m sitting in my office, tea gently steaming, biscuit in hand, looking at a webpage on my computer. I’ve just pressed publish on the Art Fluency Online Exhibition.

The practical work is all completed: images resized, titles and prices checked, artists’ words carefully copied across. All the small, fiddly decisions that go into pulling something like this together have been made.

So I’m taking a moment to look. I go back to the top of the page and start to scroll. As I begin to spend time with this display of thirty-plus paintings, I’m surprised by how emotional I feel. Letting the work have an impact. Taking in the array of different styles, the breadth of the work. Who these artists are. What they’ve made.

What strikes me, almost immediately, is how different everyone’s work is. Not in that polite “everyone is unique” kind of way, but in that very tangible way where you can feel each person’s hand and history in their paintings.

Loose, expressive pieces next to sharper, more architectural work. Colourists sitting alongside people who lean into quiet neutrals. Someone working with fragments and collage, another with precise edges and subtle shifts in tone.

It doesn’t look like a course show where you can spot the exercises; it looks like a conversation between distinct voices. And as I scroll, I feel something really lovely and unexpected.

Echoes of a previous life

Before I was teaching artists, I was a psychotherapy trainer and supervisor. One of the landmarks in that world is the Certified Transactional Analyst (CTA) qualification exam – the culmination of years of study, practice, and supervision.

When one of my supervisees passed, there was always a deep, complex rush of feeling. Not pride in the sense of “look what I did”, but a sense of satisfaction in professional collaboration over time. Delight and recognition of what it had taken for that person to reach this point.

Letting go of that world and choosing to become a full-time artist was not a light decision. One of the hardest parts was leaving the people I was working with towards CTA – stepping away from those learning relationships.

So it surprised me, sitting at my desk all these years later, to recognise an echo of that feeling while scrolling an online exhibition.

It isn’t the same, but there is a familiar quality to it. A sense that what’s on the screen in front of me represents a set of inner shifts as well as outer work. And that the journey to get here has involved more than simply picking up a few new techniques. That this work is about a co-creative collaboration.

What transformational learning looks like in the studio

Part of what I’m recognising here is the texture of transformational learning.

This is different from simply acquiring skills and adding more tools to a kit. Transformational learning changes how you see yourself and your work. It usually involves a period of unsettlement: your familiar ways of doing things stop quite working, and you have to decide whether to retreat to what you know or stay with the discomfort long enough for something else to emerge.

I think that a good art education, particularly when you’re working with artists to facilitate finding voice and authentic expression, asks for something similar.

To develop a body of meaningful work, and to bring it into a shared exhibition, people go through a cycle. They build and develop skills. They explore being seen, tolerating critique, noticing resistances and learning edges, gradually expanding what they can tolerate in their own work. You can’t do that purely at the level of “tips and tricks”. It’s a deeper shift of understanding of both yourself and your work.

When you invite people into that kind of territory, how you structure the learning – and how you respond to people along the way – really matters. I’ll almost certainly come back to this in a future post, because I think we talk far too lightly about “finding your voice” without acknowledging the impact this process has on the learner.

Seeing that process in paint

Looking at this exhibition through that lens, I’m not just seeing finished paintings. I see traces of that transformational process.

Because I know some of the stories behind the work, I’m aware of what it has taken for people to get to this point:

• Some are older and have carried the wish to be an artist for a significant portion of their lives. To show work now, publicly, is not just “doing an exhibition”. It’s stepping out of old narratives about who they’re allowed to be.

• Some are younger and beginning to test whether this could be the start of a more professional path. The stakes feel high in a different way: there is so much possibility ahead of them.

• Others are somewhere in between, weaving art around work, caring responsibilities, health, and the rest of life. The achievement is not just the painting, but the persistence.

When we strip away the tidy phrase “finding your voice”, what I often see is this:

• people allowing themselves to care deeply about their work,

• risking being seen in that,

• and staying with it long enough for something recognisable to emerge.

That asks for a certain kind of vulnerability. It asks for the everyday courage involved in returning to the studio, making another painting, saying yes to feedback, and then agreeing to let the work be seen. Decisions, repeated over time.

Co-creating the space for it to happen

The paintings exist because the artists made them. They are the ones who wrestled with composition and value, doubt and frustration, time and money and everything else that goes into making work.

What I can feel proud of is the space we’ve co-created that makes this kind of show possible, and the particular part I play in that. I don’t decide what sort of artists people should become, or what their work ought to look like. What I can do is design structures and experiences that open possibilities: short exercises, longer projects, questions and conversations that help them see their own work more clearly and test out new directions.

Often that looks like offering a contained experiment – a way of working with colour, or composition, or process – and saying, in effect, “Try this and see what you notice.” People can choose how far they take it. My role is to hold the framework, to point out what’s happening, to suggest further lines of enquiry. Theirs is to decide what lands, what they want to keep, and how it might feed back into their own studio practice.

Together, that creates a space where:

• experiments are encouraged rather than shut down,

• difference is seen as a strength, not a problem to be ironed out,

• and people are supported to keep going long enough for their work to deepen.

That’s the co-created collaboration I recognise when I look at the exhibition: not just “my teaching” or “their paintings”, but the meeting point between structured invitations and individual, ongoing commitment.

And that’s the through-line from my old life as a psychotherapy trainer to this current life with paint and canvas. In both settings, I’ve been interested in the same thing: people becoming more themselves and finding structures that support that over time.

The medium changes – conversation, paint, supervision, sketchbooks – but the underlying thread doesn’t.

Why this exhibition matters to me

So, when I look at this collection of paintings, I see more than an online show.

I see people choosing to take themselves seriously as artists, on their own terms.
I see the hours they’ve put in when nobody was watching.
I see the decision to let their work be visible, even when it still feels like a work-in-progress (which, in some sense, it always is).

And yes, I recognise in myself a version of that old feeling: a deep satisfaction in collaboration, and in what can grow when people commit to this kind of work.

If you visit the exhibition, my hope is that you’ll see more than a set of individual paintings. I hope you’ll catch a glimpse of the lives and decisions behind them, and of what becomes possible when people work at their own pace, in good company, over time.

And if you’re somewhere on that path yourself – early on, mid-journey, or circling back after a long detour – I hope this offers a small encouragement. Your slow, possibly messy process is worth continuing with. Not because it leads neatly to a line on a CV or a sale (though it might), but because making a place for your own voice in the world is, in itself, a meaningful thing to do.

You can visit the exhibition here: Online Exhibition 2026.

On Monday 16th February the Art Fluency Online Exhibition opens its virtual doors.

It brings together work from 13 artists who’ve been part of my education programmes over the last three years. Artists were invited to submit recent work for an online exhibition, and all of the pieces will be available to buy, with worldwide shipping.

On the surface, yes, this is a selling opportunity. But underneath, it’s really about something else:
community, growth, and what happens when artists take themselves – and their work – a little more seriously.

Why this exhibition matters

Over the last few years I’ve watched these artists show up again and again:
to courses, to coaching sessions, to their studios and kitchen tables.

They’ve been absorbed with composition and colour, had their confidence challenged, and doubted themselves with “Is this any good?” and “Am I really an artist?” They’ve taken risks, followed threads, and kept going.

This exhibition is a way of saying: Let’s celebrate what you’ve achieved.
It’s a moment of recognition and a way of making their development visible – to themselves and to others.

A learning experience, not just a showcase

Because I’m always thinking about how something can be a learning experience, I set this up as a mini open call rather than just asking for a few images by email.

Each artist:

• selected and photographed their work

• priced their pieces

• wrote short statements about the work

• met deadlines and submission guidelines

In other words, they’ve gone through the small but very real steps of presenting themselves as working artists.

Some of the artists are already showing work, but for some, this is the first time they’ve written about their work in a public-facing way. And, for others, it’s the first time their paintings will be shown together in a more “exhibition-like” context, rather than just appearing as individual posts on social media.

All of that is part of the education. It’s not just about learning how to make the work – it’s about learning how to present it publicly.

Why it’s not curated

One important choice I made: the exhibition is not curated.

I’m showing what has been submitted, rather than selecting or judging which pieces “make the cut”.

It felt important that, as their teacher and mentor, I didn’t move into a different role as judge or gatekeeper. That’s not what this particular exhibition is about.

Instead, it’s about:

• celebrating participation

• honouring where each artist is right now

• giving them a first taste (or another taste) of getting work out into the world in a more professional container

There will be plenty of other times in their lives as artists when selection and rejection are part of the process. This one is about visibility and encouragement.

A win–win–win

For the artists, I wanted this to be:

• a chance to see their work in a shared space

• a practical step towards professionalising their practice

• a confidence-building moment: “My work is in an exhibition”

For viewers and collectors, it’s:

• an opportunity to discover new artists

• a way to support them directly

• and perhaps to find a piece that wants to live with you

And for me, it’s a way to support artists in a slightly different way – not just in the making, but in the showing, sharing, and selling. It also gives a small glimpse of what artists who work with me are actually doing with their learning.

I hope you’ll enjoy the work being presented. I’ll share the link, along with a closer look at some of the pieces, on Monday – and I’d love it if you felt able to leave a comment in the online “Visitor Book”.

For now, I just wanted to mark the moment: a group of artists bringing their work to a public audience together. That feels worth celebrating.

For artists: February Studio Session

If you’re an artist reading this and would like some focused time on your own work, my next Studio Session is on Tuesday 17th February 3.30 - 5.30pm UK time – a two-hour live online session for artists who want a short, purposeful jolt of energy and support in their practice.

We’ll paint together, I’ll offer prompts and gentle challenges, and there’ll be space to ask questions as you go. It’s designed for artists who already have some experience and want to stretch what they’re doing, without committing to a full course.

If you’d like to join us, you can read more and book your place here: Studio and Play Session

I’ve been thinking about meaning again.

Partly because Matthew Burrows’ recent Substack “Holding the Why,” landed right on an idea I’ve been circling.

This quote caught my attention:

This felt familiar: the sense that we and our work are being asked to explain.

Tell us what it’s about. Provide the caption. Declare the message. Translate the feeling into text.

I didn’t quite know what I wanted to say in response. I had this quote, a handful of half-connected thoughts about unconscious process and discomfort, and a feeling I had something I wanted to say. What follows is me trying to find that thread as I go.

Much like painting, really.

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Knowing about vs embodied meaning

We’re living in a culture that asks for explanation.

Algorithms like tidy labels. Funding applications want clear outcomes. Social media captions reduce your process and your art to a few lines under an image.

It’s easy, under that pressure, for symbolism and commentary to move centre stage:

• This series is about grief.

• I’m using X to represent Y.

• This body of work explores liminal spaces / climate collapse / domestic labour…

There’s nothing wrong with any of that in itself. Sometimes we do start from a consciously chosen theme.

But there is a difference between:

• a painting that embodies a feeling or pattern, and

• a painting that primarily talks about a feeling or pattern.

And for me, that’s where the psychotherapist brain starts muttering in the background.

What therapy taught me about “why”

In psychotherapy, “why” is often the question people arrive with.

Why do I keep getting into the same relationships?
Why do I freeze when I want to speak?
Why can’t I just get on with my work?

People look for answers and we want stories that make sense.

Real understanding rarely comes from sitting back and explaining ourselves, and it probably doesn’t arrive because the therapist offers a clever interpretation. It emerges over time, in relationship, by staying with what actually happens and noticing: events that repeat, things we avoid, where we feel emotional pressure and how two people find themselves reacting to one another.

“Why” begins to emerge after the pattern has been lived and seen together. It’s not something we can impose at the start; it’s something that grows out of the work.

I think something very similar happens in the studio.

When the painting knows first

I’ve heard “meaning” in art talked about as if it’s something we should already know and be able to declare up front. But sometimes the painting knows before we do.

From a psychological perspective, it would be remarkable if our work didn’t contain a large amount of unconscious material. We don’t walk into the studio as blank, purely rational minds. We bring:

• early experiences of being seen or not seen,

• what was allowed to be said, and how

• patterns around control, risk, and intimacy,

• current preoccupations that haven’t yet found words.

These elements are likely to show up in the way we work long before they show up in any artist statement. They might appear as:

• forms and colours we are compulsively drawn to,

• a constant push–pull between covering over and revealing,

• a compelling insistence for order, or a determined refusal of it,

• a habit of abandoning work just as it starts to feel risky or alive.

When artists say to me, “I don’t know why I keep doing this, it’s just what happens,” that is usually a signal that something important is moving under the surface.

Like dreams, paintings are often a step ahead of our conscious understanding. We paint what we haven’t yet thought or said.

You can’t keep the unconscious out

From this angle, I don’t think it’s really possible to make art without unconscious material seeping in. If that’s so, the choice is not between:

Art with unconscious content
vs
Purely intentional, conscious art.

The choice is more like:

Do I support a process where unknown material can emerge and be noticed?

Or do I police the work and consciously remove those elements?

This is where intuitive, exploratory ways of working matter, as they are a way for the unconscious to surface. The work will carry more than we know either way; the question is where we stand in our relationship to that “more”.

Chosen symbols vs symbols that emerge

We can roughly say there are two routes to meaning:

1. A consciously chosen metaphor or symbol
   You start from something you care about and choose imagery to carry it.

   • I’m using the coastline to talk about climate change.

   • I’m using domestic objects to explore labour, and gender roles.

The work can be impactful, layered and subtle, but there is a deliberate decision at the beginning : this stands for that.

2. A metaphor or symbol emerges
   Forms, structures, colours or processes keep appearing in your work.

   • You keep painting thresholds, doorways, bridges.

   • You’re preoccupied with containers, grids, enclosures.

   • A particular colour forces its way in, again and again.

You didn’t consciously decree that doorways will represent transition or that grids will represent control. Your hand goes back to them, and only later – sometimes years later – you realise what they’ve been holding.

Both different ways of making meaning in art.

And importantly: even in the first case, where you have consciously chosen a symbol, you haven’t excluded the unconscious. You’ve simply given it a particular framework to work within. Your history will still colour:

• how that symbol appears,

• how it shifts over time,

• which versions you can tolerate and which feel “too much”.

So even “designed” meaning is rarely purely designed. The unconscious is in the mix whether we like it or not.

Different risks, different possibilities

Because these two routes sit at different points on the conscious–unconscious spectrum, they come with different tendencies and potential vulnerabilities. None of this is fixed or guaranteed – it depends how each artist works with them.

When symbols are consciously chosen:

• Possible risk: the image can end up in the service of communicating a message. If the symbol or idea takes precedence over how the painting is actually working – in terms of surface, structure, colour, rhythm – the work can start to feel flatter, more like a visual statement than a lived, evolving image.

• Possible gain: clarity and orientation. The viewer has an obvious way in. The work can sit cleanly in a political, ethical, or social discourse. You can say, “This is about X,” and it’s recognisably about X, which matters in some contexts.

When symbols emerge more unconsciously:

• Possible risk: the work can become quite opaque – almost like reading someone’s diary without knowing the backstory. The meaning may be intensely charged for the artist and almost impenetrable for anyone else. At its most extreme, it can drift towards a kind of self-enclosure, where the work feels so personal that there’s very little foothold for the viewer.

• Possible gain: you can stumble into material you would never have invented on purpose – personal, layered, unexpected. From a psychological point of view, this route is close to dreams or slips of the tongue: meaning that is shown before it can be said.

In reality, most practices move back and forth along this spectrum. The two routes don’t live in separate boxes.

A consciously chosen symbol will almost always start to pick up unconscious charge as you work with it. You might begin with a coastline as a clear metaphor for climate collapse, but over time you notice that the edges keep breaking, or the horizon keeps dropping, or a particular colour keeps insisting – all of which belong as much to your own history as to the original theme.

Equally, an image that arrives from a very private place – something you “just keep painting” without knowing why – can, over time, become a chosen symbol you work with more deliberately. Once you recognise what it’s been holding, you might decide to carry it forward into more public, political, or explicitly described work.

So rather than a hierarchy, I think of it like this:

• Sometimes the idea leads and the image follows.

• Sometimes the image leads and the thinking follows.

Most of us spend our time somewhere in between, letting the work slide back and forth across that line as it needs to.

It’s also worth saying clearly that none of this is a value judgement about what “counts” as art. There are situations where putting the symbol and the idea very firmly in front is exactly what’s needed: a direct, legible way to speak about political or social realities that might be hard to voice in any other form. My own bias is towards work that lets unconscious material lead and only names meaning slowly, but that’s simply where my practice sits. Other artists quite rightly choose to place their work in a more public, explicitly political conversation. The important thing is not which route you take, but whether the way you’re working matches what you want the work to be doing in the world.

Staying with discomfort

There’s another piece from my previous work that feels important here: how we relate to discomfort.

There is a crucial edge where:

• the material is uncomfortable,

• our instinct is to smooth it over or change the subject,

• and yet this is precisely where the deeper process often lives.

If we hurry to make it all feel better – to reassure, to rationalise, to distract – we can miss the learning that was available in staying with the knot for a little longer.

Art-making has its own version of this edge.

Most artists know the moment in a painting where things feel awkward, unresolved, even slightly wrong. We may feel the pull to:

• tidy the difficult areas,

• return to familiar moves,

• smooth away whatever feels embarrassing or exposed.

But often the richest material is right there, in the unease.

In that sense, learning to be an artist is, in part, learning to live with a level of uncertainty and discomfort in the ordinary practice of making our work. Leaving the awkward marks, not explaining everything too quickly and maybe resisting the urge to turn every painting into a well-behaved illustration of an acceptable idea.

That doesn’t mean we should never comfort ourselves, never resolve, never rest. There’s a balance to find. But if we always rush to the safe, explainable place, we risk losing something vital.

Holding the question instead

So what might an alternative stance look like?

The question of “why” – Why do these forms keep appearing? Why does this edge feel charged? Why do I keep returning to this structure? – tends to become clearer firstly over time. Stepping back for a while can bring a sense of distance that can be very helpful.

It can also help to be with the work as a group. Seeing how repeating patterns, themes and motifs repeat across time can prompt deeper enquiry. And finally look at the work alongside what has been happening in my life. Can you see a relevant metaphor or symbol in what’s happening the work that relates to your current experience.

Over time, patterns reveal themselves:

• a body of work carries the mood of a period I was living through,

• my obsession with certain structures echoes old constraints or longings,

• the paintings seem to have been rehearsing a shift before I was consciously ready for it.

At that point, “why” can be grounding and useful. It helps me recognise the thread I’ve been following and decide how to deepen it. But by then, the paintings have already done a lot of the thinking for me.

A few questions you might try

If you’re curious about meaning in your own work, you might experiment with shifting when and how you ask.

Not in the middle of every brushstroke, but perhaps:

• At the end of a session:
  What feels emotionally alive in this piece right now? Are there places I’m protecting or that feel unexpressed?

• Looking at a group of paintings:
  If these were made by someone I don’t know, what might I imagine they’re preoccupied with? What seems to keep surfacing? What associations do I make to these images?

• In journaling about your work ask yourself occasionally:
  What keeps repeating – forms, colours, gestures, situations – whether I intend it or not? What do I tend to avoid?

You might think of these as ways of leaning in to listen to the work, as if it has something to tell you, rather than something you have to justify.

And if, at this point, you still can’t quite say what your work is “about”, it might not be a problem to solve. It might simply mean that you’re in the middle of something important, and the paintings – quietly, stubbornly – know first.

Art Break Through – Meaning, Metaphor & Symbolism
If this question of what your work is “about” is tugging at you, I’ll be exploring meaning, metaphor and symbolism in more depth at the next Art Break Through workshop at the end of April. It’s a 3½-day, in-person course for abstract and semi-abstract artists who want time, structure and conversation around the deeper content of their work. You can read more here: Art Break Through

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Earlier this week I clicked on a short YouTube video by an artist–teacher. They were promising “one simple thing that will change your life and your art practice.” With the suggestion: do a little art for 20 minutes a day.

Now, I don’t actually have a problem with the 20 minutes. Small, regular contact with your work can be really valuable. What got my attention was the promise wrapped around it:

“This will change your life.”

That’s the bit that made me wince.

It’s not just this one person – I’ve been noticing these kind of grandiose claims appear a lot in the online art world: one habit that will transform everything, one programme that will unlock your true artist, one short challenge that will change your life.

But in my experience the reality of art and of being human is more complex than that.

Why those big promises grate

Part of my reaction is professional training. Before I was a full-time artist and teacher, I worked as a psychotherapist. Years of sitting with people through change – the slow kind, the messy kind, the “two steps forward, one step back” kind – leaves you with a strong allergy to grand claims.

Real change rarely comes from a single intervention. It usually involves:

• timing

• support

• nervous-system capacity

• practical circumstances (money, time, caring responsibilities)

• and a lot of repetition and experimentation.

Against that backdrop, “20 minutes a day will change your life” feels less like support and more like fantasy.

There’s another layer too. For many people, life is already full: work, family, health, ageing parents, fluctuating energy. In that context, a “simple” daily habit can easily become another stick to beat yourself with:

• “If it’s that simple and I can’t manage it, what does that say about me?”

• “Everyone else seems to be doing it – I must be the problem.”

Instead of offering an opening into practice, it reinforces the inner critic.

What 20 minutes a day can actually do

And yet, I don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

For some artists, 15–20 minutes of gentle contact with their work most days can be very helpful. For other artists 15 – 20 minutes a week can do the same. It can:

• keep the work alive in the background of a busy week

• lower the threshold for starting (“I’m only going in for a short while”)

• create a thread of continuity between longer studio sessions

• offer a small container to play without the pressure of “making something good”

That’s all useful. I’m just not sure it’s a guaranteed transformation.

A more reality-based version might sound like:

“If it works with your life, then short, regular contact with your work can help you feel more connected to your practice and make it easier to return.”

Less of a soundbite and much less dramatic. And probably more honest.

Reality, not miracles

What I’d love to see more of on social media is language that respects the complexity of people’s lives.

There’s a big difference between:

• “This might support you,” and

• “This will change your life.”

The first leaves room for your context, your body, your history. The second skips straight past all of that and implies a guarantee no one can actually make for strangers on the internet.

In my own teaching, I try to offer things as options rather than prescriptions:

• Here’s a structure you can try.

• Here’s how it has helped other people.

• You get to decide whether it fits your current life.

No halos. No magic keys. Just tools you can experiment with.

A question for you

So rather than asking, “What’s the one thing that will change my life?”, you might find it more helpful to ask:

• What kind of contact with my work feels possible and supportive right now?

For you, that might be:

• a 20-minute daily drawing ritual

• one longer session at the weekend

• a sketchbook by the sofa for evening scribbles

• a month of simply looking at old work and noticing what’s there

• or a season where your practice is mostly incubation and thinking

All of these are valid. None of them need to be labelled as life-changing to matter.

The work of being an artist is slower and deeper than any “one simple thing” can capture. And in my view, that’s a good thing.

Happening Soon

At the end of each Insight I’ll share a short note about upcoming teaching – short workshops, longer programmes online sessions, and anything else you can join in with

.

Mixed Media Festival with Lydia Rink 2–22 February 2026
I’m one of 11 artists teaching in Lydia Rink’s online Mixed Media Festival. Over three weeks you’ll get 11 in-depth mixed media video lessons (released every second day) and a full year’s access.

In my session I’ll be using chine collé on the gel plate to create layered papers and monoprints.
👉 Full details and early-bird booking: Mixed Media Festival

Please note this is a sponsored link.

🎨 February Studio Session — Colour on Tuesday 17 February, 3.30–5.30pm UK
A live Zoom session exploring colour as material and relationship. We’ll work with limited palettes and simple mixing frameworks to see how colour behaves, how tones interact, and how small shifts change the feel of a painting.
👉 Book your place (£18): https://linc-art.com/studio-and-play-sessions/

Over the last two posts I’ve been circling around two linked ideas:

• visual language as the foundation stones of painting, and

• a simple model for understanding how artists learn and develop.

This last article turns towards application. What difference does any of this make in practice – in how we learn, and in how we teach?

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Looking Back at My Own Training

Before I ever taught art, I took a wide variety of workshops. A few were excellent, many were enjoyable, and some were frankly confusing. Together, they taught me something important about how artists are often taught in shorter workshops and one-off courses.

One of my first “proper” courses was a solid oil painting workshop. The teaching was competent, the tutor generous, and the focus was on painting loosely and impressionistically. I came away able to paint very much in their style.

After that came a run of acrylic courses: dramatic colour, drips and splatters, abstracted landscapes, ways to “loosen up”. I tried some watercolour classes that were entirely about the paint. Later, I joined a big international programme that offered some useful perspectives and one or two big ideas, but still felt piecemeal and fragmented.

I was learning techniques without understanding how paintings work.

This wasn’t true of every course I’ve ever taken, and there are some excellent longer-term programmes and crit groups out there. But in the early stages of learning, especially in short workshops, a pattern did emerge:

Looking back I can see that no-one was explicitly teaching visual language. No-one was offering a clear sense of how artists develop over time. There was no framework or structure to help me understand how techniques and theory, process, practice, and mindset fit together.

I could make things – sometimes good things – but I couldn’t see why they worked, why they didn’t, or how to build on them. When things got messy or difficult I had no clear way to understand what was happening or how to solve the problem. Much of that, I can now see, was due to learning in fragments.

The Lightbulb: “Why Is No One Teaching Like This?”

The deeper realisation came a bit later, a few years into my training and work as a psychotherapy trainer and supervisor.

In that world, I was regularly running workshops and seeing first-hand how simple structures shaped learning. Taking time for introductions and group forming eased people’s anxiety. Clear contracting built trust in me as the teacher. Making space to reflect and discuss helped people integrate what they were doing. When those elements were missing, the atmosphere was different – people were more on edge about what was coming, more distracted, and sometimes a bit mistrustful. I could see that the learning setting itself became less stable, not because of the content, but because the basic structures that support adults to learn together weren’t in place.

At some point – I think around the COVID years – I found myself wondering:

Why is none of this happening in art workshops?
Why are we not forming the group?
Why is there no space for reflection or discussion?
Why do we spend so much time standing in silence, watching the tutor demonstrate, then going away to copy what they’ve shown us?

I recognised that I was sitting in rooms where basic adult learning principles weren’t being used. There was a lot of demonstration and imitation, but much less structured experience, reflection, and integration.

Not long after that, I started to experiment.

When I ran an early modular version of Directions in Abstraction, I did so using these ideas. I began to introduce some of the structures I knew from my psychotherapy and teaching background: online breakout groups, reflective prompts, simple exercises followed by discussion, and time to articulate what people were noticing in their work – all within a clear focus on learning about visual language in the course content.

I remember feeling slightly nervous about it, because I hadn’t seen anyone else in the art-teaching world doing this in quite that way. But the feedback was clear. People found it useful. They felt seen as learners, not just as pairs of hands copying a technique.

The response to those early modules reassured me that I wasn’t imagining the gap: combining visual-language teaching with simple learning structures made a real difference to how people engaged and what they took from the work.

The Core Problem: Teaching Without a Model

In my experience, a great deal of the short-form, workshop-based art teaching, even when it’s done with care, still looks like this:

“Here’s how I paint.”
“Here’s a technique I use.”
“Here’s my way of solving this problem.”

There’s value in that. We can and do learn by watching other people work. But my critique is that if there’s no underlying structure guiding the teacher, the risk is that everything lands as separate pieces: a bit of colour theory here, a compositional trick there, a few process tips somewhere else.

Then the hard work of joining the dots is left to the student. When that inevitably feels confusing, it’s easy to internalise the confusion as “I must not be very good at this,” rather than “I haven’t been given a joined-up education.”

For me, the real shift came when I stopped thinking of teaching as passing on techniques, and started thinking of it as working inside a model of how people actually learn and develop.

Two simple models have been particularly useful.

These are the ones I work with; the point isn’t that everyone should adopt this exact combination, but that teaching from some kind of clear framework is very different from teaching a string of isolated techniques.

Kolb’s Cycle: The How of Learning

The first is Kolb’s experiential learning cycle. It describes something most of us recognise:

We do something.
We reflect on what happened.
We make sense of it – what worked, what didn’t, what’s missing.
We try again a little differently.

Round and round.

In other words: experience, reflection, understanding, action. It sounds obvious, but once you start designing teaching with this in mind, things change.

What this looks like in practice

Let’s take an example where artists begin with an experience. That might be a timed study, a limited palette, a compositional constraint, or a specific surface to work on. The point is that people don’t start by thinking about painting; they start by painting.

Then I build in time to reflect. Sometimes that’s through a few focused journal prompts. In groups it’s often small-group discussion or breakout rooms online, where artists talk about what they noticed, what felt sticky, what surprised them.

When we come back together, I’ll pull the threads into some shared learning: what we can see more clearly now, which questions have opened up, where the gaps are. From there, each person identifies a next step – one small action or adjustment to take into their work.

That’s Kolb in motion. It works in a ten-month course and it works in a two-hour Studio Session. The time frame can change but the underlying pattern doesn’t.

Theory, Process, Practice: The What of Learning

The second model is about content rather than process: what artists need to develop, not just how they move through experience. Your own framework might look different in its details. What matters is that you can see what you’re trying to support in people’s development, rather than just passing on your personal way of working.

The way I hold it now is in three intertwined domains:

• Theory – the bedrock: visual language, colour, composition, value – how paintings actually function.

• Process – how you work: intuition, reference, decision-making, materials, where ideas enter the work.

• Practice – the container: your studio habits, rhythm, capacity to keep going, and ability to stay with uncertainty.

Mindset runs through all three. Questions and doubts don’t live in a separate “mindset box”; they show up precisely at the points where theory, process or practice are under strain.

How this shapes course design

When I design a course or workshop now, I’m thinking in these terms. This model gives me a framework that isn’t based on “how do I do it?”, but on “what do people need to understand in order to learn something new, integrate it, and become more competent?”

For theory, I ask: what do people genuinely need to understand here about how paintings function? Then I teach that as clearly as I can, and always in connection with what they’re actually making.

For process, I create ways for artists to notice how they work: reflective questions, exercises that reveal habits, constraints that surface their defaults, invitations to look at other artists or research approaches that resonate with their interests.

For practice, I think about continuity. What rhythm of work will let this land? Do they need weekly prompts, a small series, a longer arc of paintings, or simply permission to stay with something over time?

Mindset is addressed as it arises. In longer programmes there is often coaching threaded through: live conversations about doubt, comparison, urgency, or fear, held in the context of the work itself.

This is the backbone of Directions in Abstraction, my ten-month course. But the same structure sits under a single Studio Session too – it’s just compressed and adjusted to the scale.

Development Is Spiral, Not Straight

When you look at learning through these two lenses – Kolb’s cycle, and the theory–process–practice model – something else comes into view.

Development is not a straight line. It’s spiral.

You learn something. You try it. At some point you reach the edge of what that understanding can support. A new direction or interest exposes a gap. You find yourself back at what look like “basics”, but at a deeper level than before. That new depth reshapes your process. Your practice shifts to hold it. The work changes.

Then, eventually, another gap appears. And round you go.

Seen this way, returning to fundamentals isn’t a sign you’ve failed to move on. It’s exactly what healthy development looks like.

So What Does This Actually Mean?

It’s one thing to enjoy the neatness of a model. It’s another for it to change how you work. So here’s how I see the implications.

If you’re an artist

If most of your learning so far has been through standalone courses, YouTube tutorials, Instagram tips and the odd in-person workshop, and struggling, it’s very likely that what’s missing isn’t effort or talent; it’s a framework.

You don’t have to adopt mine, but having some sense of:

• how you learn best,

• what you’re trying to develop (theory, process, practice), and

• where you are in that spiral,

can make a huge difference. It lets you choose courses and teachers more consciously. It gives you a way to understand why you feel stuck that isn’t “I must just be bad at this”. And it gives you something to lean on when the work is in flux.

If you teach, or want to teach

If you’re already teaching, or beginning to, working with a model can be a relief. It means you don’t have to try to tell people everything you do in the hope something lands. It doesn’t have to be my model – just a framework that helps you decide what to offer, when, and why.

You can design around experience and reflection, rather than long demonstrations.
You can be explicit about which part of development you’re addressing: is this about an aspect of visual language, about process, about practice?
And you can help people see where this workshop or course fits in the larger arc of their learning.

It also makes teaching less personal. When a student struggles, you have somewhere to look: is there a gap in theory? Is their process misaligned with what they’re trying to do? Do they simply not yet have a practice that can hold the kind of work they want?

For me, this is the usefulness of models in art education. They don’t replace intuition or discovery. They give those things a spine – so that artists, and those who teach them, can move with more clarity and confidence.

I’m curious how this lands for you. When you look back over the courses, workshops and tutorials you’ve taken, do you notice any patterns in how you’ve been taught? And if you had to name one area you’d like more structure around right now – visual language, process, or practice – which would it be?

If you’d like to experience a course built around this kind of framework, Directions in Abstraction is my ten-month programme for artists who want to strengthen their foundations in visual language and develop a more coherent body of work. You can read more about it here:
👉 Directions in Abstraction