There are paintings that arrive through looking, and there are paintings that arrive through feeling.
This one was the latter.
I did not set out to make a painting about loss. I did not begin with a clear idea of what it needed to say. I only knew that I needed to paint. To stand in front of the canvas and let something move through me that had nowhere else to go.
Recently, we suffered a miscarriage.
It is a strange position, being the partner. You are close to the centre of it, but not quite at the centre. You are heartbroken, but you are also trying to hold everything else together. You are grieving, but also watching someone you love go through something physical and emotional that you cannot take from them.
There is a particular kind of helplessness in that.
You want to fix it. You want to say the right thing. You want to be useful. You want to absorb some of the pain, or at least make the shape of it smaller. But grief does not work like that. The body does not work like that. Loss does not become less real because you are standing beside it, willing it to soften, or to be easier.
A few of those days were practical. Hospital rooms. Laughing at the inappropriate choice of tv channel i9⁹n the waiting room… people baking, literally putting buns in the oven… I mean really?! Questions. General Anaesthetic. Trying to understand what was happening while also trying to stay calm. Making tea. Looking after the kids. Answering messages. Moving through the ordinary rhythms of family life and work while something very tender and private was unfolding beneath it all.
And then, today, I painted.
Not because painting changes any of it or makes it better. It didn’t. Not in any simple way.
But it gave the feeling somewhere to go.
There is something about paint that can hold what language can’t. The scraping back. The pushing forward. The smudging of one colour into another. The way a mark can be both deliberate and out of your control. The way a surface can become a place where heaviness, tenderness, confusion and love can all exist at once.
This painting became that place.
The sky kept opening and closing as I worked. Soft blues, greys, pale washes of light. A low line of earth. A bruised horizon. There is warmth in it, and a brightness to it, but it is not bright exactly. It is the kind of light that comes after something has passed through. Not the light of certainty. Not the light of easy hope. More like the quiet presence of something still remaining.
When I finished it, I cried. Those who spend time with me know that doesn’t happen a lot.
Not dramatically. Not because I had decided what the painting meant. It was more sudden than that. As if my body had understood before I had. As if the painting had carried something to the surface and, once it was there, I could no longer keep it held in.
That is one of the reasons I paint.
Not to explain life neatly. Not to make difficult things beautiful in a way that tidies them up. But because painting allows me to meet what I am carrying without always having to name it first.
Where the Light Rests is not only about sadness. It is not only about loss. It is about the strange tenderness that surrounds loss too. The love that remains. The quiet work of standing beside someone. The moments where there is nothing to solve, only something to witness.
It is about the place where grief and light can sit together.
And perhaps that is what I felt when I stepped back from the canvas. Not closure. Not resolution. But a place for it all to rest.
Is this something that everyone needs to know about me, my family. Perhaps not, but Notes from the studio is about me and my work, my paintings and the inspirations behind them. Oh… and writing about it all helps.
