Once More: Notes from the Studio While Painting Don Quixote
We’re friends now. lol
Once more
Notes from the studio while painting Don Quixote
This piece wasn’t written neatly at a desk.
Most of it came out of voice memos recorded in my studio while I was finishing the painting. Some of it is reflection. Some of it is thinking out loud. Some of it probably borders on madness, which feels about right when you’re talking about Don Quixote.
What follows is a collection of thoughts pulled together from that process. Not a polished essay, more like fragments from the studio floor.
Where this started
Last year Tom Ranahan approached me about taking part in an exhibition called Tilting at Windmills. Artists responding to Don Quixote.
At first I did what anyone would probably do. I started looking at the obvious references. The armour, the horse, the windmills, Gustave Doré. The whole classic image. Just trying to understand the character.
At the same time we’d all started sharing bits of our process through the exhibition Instagram page. That was actually brilliant. It meant we could see how differently everyone was approaching the same story. Some artists leaned into the classic imagery, others went somewhere completely different. Watching that unfold definitely nudged my own thinking along the way.
But quite quickly I realised something. I wasn’t interested in illustrating the book. I wanted to get under the skin of the bloke.
Me and Don in the studio - currently drying ready to be photographed…
Don Quixote in Birmingham
One of the first thoughts I had was slightly ridiculous.
What if Don Quixote lived now? What if he was just some guy in the city centre?
I sit in my studio in Digbeth and I can see the Rotunda from the window. I’m surrounded by scooters dumped on street corners, Deliveroo riders flying past, people just trying to get through the day. So I started imagining him charging through Dale End on an electric scooter instead of a horse, completely convinced he was heading into battle.
That idea made me laugh, but it also unlocked something. Because suddenly Don Quixote wasn’t some dusty character from a seventeenth century Spanish novel. He was just a bloke in a city trying to make sense of the chaos around him.
And honestly, that’s not far off most of us.
The curveball
In my life I very rarely give people the expected answer. If there’s an obvious route, I’ll usually sketch it out first just to understand it. But then I’m immediately thinking, right… where’s the curveball?
Painting works the same way for me. I don’t want someone to look at a painting and go, “Oh that’s nice,” and walk away. I want them to stop, tilt their head, and think: hang on… what the hell is going on there?
The horse
For a while the horse was there. I’d gathered references, anatomical studies, the posture, the movement.
Then one evening I had a thought that made my whole head light up. What happens if the horse just isn’t there?
He’s still riding. He’s still holding the reins. But the horse is gone.
That was the moment everything clicked. Because the delusion suddenly becomes visible. The viewer knows something is missing, but he doesn’t.
Suddenly the painting becomes a psychological space instead of a historical scene.
Once more
Around this time the phrase once more started looping in my head.
It’s obviously tied to Shakespeare. Once more unto the breach, dear friends. But it also felt exactly like Don Quixote.
He gets smashed off the horse. Everyone tells him he’s an idiot. And what does he do?
Gets back on. Again.
Once more.
That word became the heartbeat of the painting. So I carved it into his knuckles. Not painted over it, painted around it. It’s literally the ground of the painting showing through.
Dorothy in the house…
Paint like a storm
At some point the painting stopped behaving politely. That’s when I knew it was getting somewhere.
The background turned into a kind of whirlwind. Not literal windmills, more like the psychological storm inside his head.
If you’ve ever watched The Wizard of Oz when Dorothy’s house is spinning through the air, that’s the closest visual reference I can think of. He’s inside the storm.
Brushstrokes flying everywhere. Paint dripping. Sometimes I was literally throwing paint at the canvas, attacking it the way he attacks windmills.
It felt right. Messy. Violent. Alive.
The face
The face was a battle. I deliberately pushed sickly greens into the skin. Sap greens, yellows, bruised blues. Colours that make him look like he’s halfway between heroic and completely unhinged.
I love doing that. Faces that sit right on the edge of something, where you’re not sure if the person is a genius, a lunatic, or both.
Attack…
Don and me
Somewhere along the way something else happened. He stopped being a character and started becoming… familiar.
Like he’d walked into the studio and was hanging around.
It sounds mad but that’s honestly what it felt like. I’d look up from the painting and think, alright Don, what are we doing next then?
Weirdly, that’s how painting works sometimes. You stop forcing it and the painting starts talking back.
The difficult truth
There’s another layer to this painting that I didn’t really clock until later.
When I look at Don Quixote, I see a lot of people I’ve known in my life. People who live partly inside imagined worlds because reality has been too brutal.
Somebody close to me developed psychosis when they were young. For a long time they genuinely believed things that weren’t real.
Watching that happen to someone you love is complicated. You see the vulnerability. You see the fragility. You also see the strange resilience.
And when I look at this painting now, I can’t help seeing that in Don as well.
Not just madness. Humanity.
Don’s part of the family now
When I step back and look at the painting, he sits in exactly the same emotional universe as the Wonder Series I painted in 2024.
The same questions. Imagination. Survival. Hope. People trying their absolute hardest to stay upright in a world that keeps knocking them sideways.
He belongs with them now.
Don’s part of the family.
What I feel when I look at it
After everything, the grief, the chaos, the thinking, the madness of making it, what I feel most strongly when I look at this painting is something really simple.
Humanity.
Just a human being trying their best.
Getting knocked down.
Getting back up.
Once more.
Once More
Emma Woolley
Oil and charcoal on linen
122 × 90 cm
2026
Original Framed: £1981
Unframed Limited Edition Prints: 18×24 (10 only) £125
(Limited Edition Prints will be available in shop soon)
Created for Tilting at Windmills
Curated by Tom Ranahan
The Courtyard Gallery, The Core, Solihull
8–25 April 2026
Tilting at Windmills
Private View: Thursday 9 April, 5–8pm
Exhibition: 8–25 April 2026
The Courtyard Gallery, The Core, Solihull
More details:
https://www.tiltingatwindmills.co.uk/
Follow the exhibition:
@tilt.ingatwindmills
@emma_woolley_artist