As I may have said before, now and again I feel drawn towards painting and for a long time I have wanted to work with wax – I remember making a wax house during my BA which is a long time ago now. I don’t know where the piece is now; I was quite proud of it at the time. I did some other work using wax at the time – covering bashed up toy cars in it. The use of wax also resonates with a time in my childhood when I was happy: I used to spend many hours together with my mother doing batik – even now, we get on best when we meet through a creative project.
So, I’ve been trying out some very small painting experiments in encaustics – at the moment this is just a way of exploring my interest in materials. I am feeling a shift in practice coming on, but am not at all sure where that shift is taking me. Somewhere I think it is about bringing in some kind of narrative.
This piece is a response to an early spring walk with my dog – one of the first walks with him after he had an operation to remove a fairly aggressive tumour.
