I made that splash precisely a year ago today. And what a year it’s been. I wanted to splash things from a height for a long time. Somehow New Year’s Eve 2019 was the perfect time. I remember stealing into the studio and making two cerise type pinks balanced with an apple green as my flying colours. I laid the large canvas flat on the ground and went upstairs to set up my ammunition.
Then I let fly with the pink, just abandoning myself to luck. It felt great. The darker pink followed, then the green. Once I had no paint left, I walked down to see the results.
The canvas had to stay flat on the ground for another week or so before it was dry enough to hang on the wall. I worked into it slowly over the coming months, in Spring I added a tall yellow shape with wings to lighten it a bit. A few months later, I painted the swath of red at the bottom, which seemed to bring order to the surrounding chaos.
The flower in the top left-hand corner came from working in my lockdown studio, surrounded by flowers. I think their colours seeped into a lot of the paintings osmotically. The linear blue structure at the bottom came from drawings I did while in Berlin.
For me, the splash is like a craziness in a piece of music that is somehow mellowed by an organised slow placement of different forms. It’s a dance of instant chaos and slow, methodical choices. I haven’t splashed paint in this way since, but looking at the video now all these months later, I want to do some more.
