Etel Adnan's comment (in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist) inspires a different kind of perspective. Equating a painting to a conversation speaks volumes for the kind of quality and respect we might expect of ourselves in our lives and daily interactions and the kind of thoughtfulness this requires.

In an interview I heard recently, artist Idris Murphy quoted Picasso along the lines of finding out what the artist is really after, as opposed to what they think they are after. This made me reflect on my work practice and what interests me as opposed to what I know has interested me in the past.

Innovation came up higher on the list than I had realised; after twenty years of working, I am increasingly interested in experimenting with different tools and techniques to address ideas.

Connection was another one; I want people to reach out towards the painting and the painting to reach out towards them.

I also considered differences in how the viewer and artist might see the work. As an artist one sees a canvas at its most vulnerable; incomplete, unresolved and sometimes flattened. The artist keeps the secrets of the painting as well as their own!

The painting may be still and soundless but it also connects you to the time of its inception and creation and to every decision and gesture undertaken in its name.

Go as close as you dare and bring something back.

What does this gist of a comment by John Berger mean to you?

What is that we are getting close to? What happens if we get too close? What is it that we can bring back? How does it change us? Just some of the questions that come to mind.

It's a practice of investigation (science, journalism, observation) married to a human capacity and drive towards play" - Helen Molesworth, 'Open Questions: Thirty Years of Writing about Art'.

Attention, experimentation, curiosity, exploration and commitment - these are some of the words that come to mind from this definition. I just started reading the book and even the title is enough to get you thinking.

Bridget Riley's quote captures that hard to pin down moment between idea, inspiration and exploration. Once I have my idea in mind, I have to consciously put it on pause (who knows though, what's going on behind the scenes, unconsciously?). Working through the idea only happens once the making starts.

"Art is containing the various ways that things call attention, that gets you standing still, that gets you puzzled, gets you thinking about it, even if you have to read something about it and gets you coming back" - Sam Gilliam

For me, defining art as a direct action related to calling attention gives the practice of creating it a different kind of immediacy, integrity and depth. Amongst other things it involves curiosity, problem-solving, research, reflection as well as the compulsion to create and brings together the whole self. This is one quote of many on the subject, but what struck me was the dynamism it conveys.

Looking for answers, looking for questions. Creativity's inbuilt components of imagination, curiosity and action can raise as well as address challenging and sometimes impossible questions.

'Songs of Spring' - Could I find a common human thread in paintings created while listening to nature-inspired music from different cultures?

In 'Human-in-Residence' - What might personal transformation on and off the canvas look like?

'A Moment of Grace', my first abstract work - Could painting help me face a life-changing family crisis?

It is hard enough to find the answers, sometimes harder still to find the questions.

There is power in having a will to understand. This thoughtful quote from 'On Reading' by poet Ursula Andkjær Olsen makes an important point:

"You can read experiences that are so far from your own that you can hardly understand them, it's not that you understand them just by reading them, but there’s a will to understand." The focus here is on being open-minded and willing to understand experiences that are different from ours, not about having a complete understanding. The process starts with wanting to know.

To create is compelling; it must be done for one to feel complete.

It expresses the secret self that lives inside, the one only we know. On the one hand, art offers to beguile and tempt, by offering us the riches of knowing and showing ourselves and connecting our internal and external worlds. However that sharing goes through a process of tempering, of moderating, adjusting and revising. We may say that we express our truth but the whole truth is that some of us may have tucked a part away under the carpet. I know I have.

Moving from 'What is' to 'What if'

Questioning our present to questioning possible futures is something we can apply to all aspects of our lives. If the 'What if' becomes the new 'What is', there is further scope for imagination and so the cycle continues. 'What if' is the premise of every next move when I am painting and there are times when it doesn't work the way I had hoped. Commenting on his move to abstract painting, the artist Gerhard Richter said, "It has to tell the truth and it has to look good". To get to the truth and for it to look good, we have to know what the questions are and how to ask them.

“When a painting is complete and has got the unity and power, it comes across, even in a bad reproduction I think, because all the transitions to its final form are still there, they are not lost by a black and white reproduction.” - Aida Tomescu

Ideas of presence and absence are often palpable in creative work. Listening to artist Aida Tomescu's interview, I was struck by this comment, which somehow slows time down. In a completed painting, we can still see that transition to the final form, that moment of transformation from incomplete to complete. We can see the last choices the artist made to bring it all together. It feels like we shared the last moments of their journey and they have just turned away. Perhaps this sense of engaging with a person through their painting is part of the power of the experience of engagement.

“Curiosity is relevant to what we can build in our minds, but also what we can build in the world”- Perry Zurn & Dani S. Bassett

In conversation with Bon Ku about their upcoming book, ‘Curious Minds: The Power of Connection’, Perry Zurn & Danni Bassett note that definitions of curiosity are often incomplete, referring to it simply as a desire to get something, while missing out on its “capacity to bridge different pieces of information, to connect them up with one another”. For me, curiosity is motivating, feels effortless and enriches creativity in all aspects of my life and work. Although I am curious about many things, they tend to be the things which interest or intrigue me. The action component of curiosity wasn't something I had considered before, but it has now made me think about the relationship between traits and behaviours and intention and intentionality. Lots more to be curious about including this book! The authors believe in the importance of taking a break so our minds have the time to “weave things together”. Time to take a break and mull this over.

Since life opened up I felt I needed to catch up with it, but in the process, realised that that my attention had wandered off.

I am now recalibrating because in order to address authentic questions in my life and work, I need to be able to hear them. For something to be meaningful it has to be something that I am curious about, an idea that captures all of me. When I see something in nature that draws my attention or makes me need to look again, I want to know why. Stopping and asking engages me with the experience in a different way.

“Slow time does not mean doing things more slowly…Slow time is entering into a living relationship with the present”. -Sue Stuart-Smith, The Well Gardened Mind.

Anyone who has created something with their whole self can understand the fullness of the experience. When intuition, logic, imagination, emotion and body are integrated in decision making, there is a different kind of intelligence at work. Part of what makes us unique is the creative choices we make on a given day. In painting these may be the marks we choose to make, to hide, to ultimately create unique solutions to the questions we carry within us.

We often find references to internal and external topographies or landscapes. These can inspire questions and give us insights.

“If you follow the root/route in both senses of that word back all the way…you will find that our verb ‘to learn’ has a root meaning of to find or follow a track” -Robert Macfarlane

If I followed a track I might wonder who or what created that track, how often and when they passed by and where they were going. In following a track, in pursuing learning throughout our lives, as we grow and change we can find new ways back to ourselves. We can also create new pathways for others to follow.

Regardless of the starting point for my work, my intention during the creative process is always positive. Often, my work connects to the sense of wonder and wellbeing we can have when we are in nature. When I hand over a painting, my hope is that it may be a nourishing experience for the person who gives it a home and lives with it.

In Sean Carrol’s talk about why we perceive our past, present and future so differently, he refers to the concept of entropy, describing it as “the disorderliness of a system, the randomness, the disorganisation”. He adds that “there is a law of nature that is true in our macroscopic, everyday world that says that entropy increases over time.” (Long Now Foundation)

This comment made me think about possible connections between entropy and creativity. Rearranging a system and creating new relationships between things doesn’t have to be a disorganised process, it is often methodical. However, with the passage of time we will be exposed to more events (even if they are repetitive or monotonous) and these events - which could be experiences, happenings, feelings and behaviours - could increase possibilities for multiple ideas, connections and perspectives. It doesn’t necessarily make us more creative but might allow for different combinations of opportunities to be creative, by virtue of the passage of time on our environment too.

Perhaps at this point we need imagination, to be curious about these opportunities and take some creative action.

Accepting that not only loved ones but we too, change, can be confronting. I have been working on a series about impermanence, the fact that some things only last for a limited time and was considering how it relates to change, where something becomes different. There is an overlap, but impermanence has a sense of melancholy to me, whereas change can be more dynamic, positive or negative. Often in both cases, these can be situations or eventsbeyond our control.

Creativity can offer us a way to make our inner emotions more visible, through music, drama, painting etc we can express them through form and perhaps begin to acknowledge, identify and understand our feelings at a different level.

Three days into the new year I found myself nodding and saying that I need to be more accepting of the fact that things don’t always go to plan. This is something I am aware of. Problem-solving or finding a solution is not the issue. It's more of a reality check; in our strange times time + effort seem to take longer to translate into results. The flow has changed too.