Are you ready for some blurry photo action? I had one of my sudden and unexpected ‘artbursts’ {see what I did there?} last night, the kind where I just unexpectedly sit down and paint, and time simultaneously stops and speeds up, so when you surface you realise it’s waaaaaay past your bedtime.

I visited a couple of Open Houses this weekend {it’s May which means the Brighton Festival and Open House season, where people open their homes to the public and display the work of all kinds of local artists}, and was particularly inspired by some paintings of trees, so I sat down and did a tree painting on paper.

I started with some collage and a sketch.

Then some Titan Buff.

Then colours.

Initially I used charcoal for the tree outline, but it rubbed off {obvs}, so I painted over it with sumi ink and a very tiny brush. There will definitely be more of this ~ muy satisfying.

I used stamps and doileys to make the patterns, and painted layers which I then rubbed back so it looks all textured and old. Lovely.

I found the Kahlil Gibran quote online; I wanted to use something by Hafiz {I seem to love every single thing he ever said} but this was the one that popped out at me.

It was a real pleasure to make this one, and I’m very happy with the result.

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PS. Thank you so much to everyone who chipped in with title ideas for the untitled painting; it really helped kick start me with possibilities. I decided on ‘Holding Space’ in the end, partly because it just occurred to me, and also because of the spaces in it, like the white area and the turquoise part under the ‘arm’.