Throwing out the Rulebook along with the Art!!!

There’s something both terrifying and exhilarating about taking a massive left turn in the middle of a project.  Having spent hours, maybe days, building up layers, refining details and finessing composition only to suddenly question everything.

That’s where I found myself over the weekend. I had been working on a piece that leaned towards the traditional, something rooted in structure, texture and recognizable form. Something that was quite different to what I have done before.  Would you believe, it was working.   Which to me was precisely the problem. It worked, but it didn’t speak. It wasn’t alive in the way I needed it to be.

So, I did what any rational artist would do. I threw it all away.

Not literally, I put the panel aside to come back to with a different idea in the coming months. I decided I needed to strip things back, peeling away every unnecessary element, distilling it down to its core.  I abandoned realism in favor of abstraction, exchanged depth for flatness and let go of any complexity in favor of something stark, bold, and hopefully way more impactful.

This shift wasn’t just about aesthetics. It’s about energy, about finding the pulse of the piece rather than getting caught up in the mechanics of technique.  Sometimes, art doesn’t need to be intricate to be powerful. Sometimes, a single bold line, a perfectly placed shape or an unexpected colour can carry more weight than a thousand details.

The result?  I don’t know yet, but I hope it will be a piece that feels right.  It’s one that I hope will make its way into an exhibition in the coming months, fingers crossed.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned through this process, it’s that limitations are often self-imposed.  Maybe we cling to our original plans because they feel safe, because we’ve invested time and effort into them.  But growth, and I mean real, meaningful artistic growth can only happen when we’re willing to let go.

So, if you find yourself stuck, if your work feels like it’s just working but not speaking, consider taking a massive left turn. You might just end up somewhere far more interesting than you originally planned!