R E B I R T H

At some point in your life, you might discover your calling – something you never persued – either because you didn't have time, thought you weren’t good enough, or perhaps it was simply something you never even thought of before.

When you do discover your calling, it's quite like being reborn.

That isn't to say it's all easy, as you might know, birth is messy, painful and sometimes full of complications. Finding ones calling is much the same – elation, joy, wonderment, excitement and awe are mixed with fears, pain and hard work to name a few.

My calling to be an artist was a journey I'd embarked on before I picked up a brush with intention. It was always there, but I chose to ignore it. I'd spent most of my life doing work I wasn't 100% invested in – things that never lit me up – to a point that I quite literally hated doing it, and saw no way out.

When I started painting I had a new lease on life in so many ways. I started looking at my environment with an artists eye – shadows where blue, green and purple instead of grey. Storm clouds that I used to shy away from I now embrace for all their acrobatic drama. Nothing I looked at was boring – even a pebble from the beach holds secrets of the master artist: Nature.

I realised I was essentially like a little baby again, looking at the world through a different lense. Likewise, as an artist, I started a career right at the bottom, amidst giants.

The REBIRTH collection illustrates this notion – of being reborn, seeing the world for the first time through naïve eyes, exploring and discovering the vast unknown – from the universe within to the universe outside.

“Starseed”

122cm w X 92cm h

Where does creativity come from? When an idea forms in ones mind is it simply neurons carrying memories, experiences and emotions colliding to form a creative thought, or does it come from “somewhere else”? Is that initial spark some sort of divinity that one taps into? Although I relate finding my calling as an artist to being reborn, creative ideas that magically appear in my mind are of a similar nature. They're often initially chaotic, and I have to make sense of it later. The universe seems much the same (if that's what I'm connected to – or even if it's the microscopic universe within my physical brain), there's chaos which has an order or purpose to it.

Starseed is the child in this painting, being born from the universe – expelled from an exploding star – as is someone who found their calling, as is a creative idea that bursts into your mind. The light is blinding, there's chaos, noise and debris but you can't stop that seed of thought, you can't miss it, and you can't ignore it because it's just too beautiful. One could argue philosophically that we are all children of the stars, and that creativity is our connection to the universe – an invisible umbilical chord that feeds us with music, dance, poetry and art.

I cannot fathom how sterile the world would be without it.