Studio Notes: Pan
This is the second in a series of reflections on the paintings that brought me back to painting.
Here on my blog, Notes from the Studio, I’m exploring how colour, instinct, memory, and imagination shaped this body of work — piece by piece. Today, I’m looking back at Pan.
It was May 6th, 2024. Sixteen days after I painted Boy in the Red Glasses, I picked up my brush again. That first painting had woken something up in me. After a full year away from painting, it had pulled me back into the room - energetically, emotionally, spiritually. I say it often now, half-joking, half-serious - when I paint, I enter the astral plane. I disappear. That feeling is addictive. I wanted to go back in.
This time I tried something new. I’d picked up a Daler-Rowney Georgian Oil Painting Pad - 290gsm, 20 x 16 inches. Usually I paint upright at my Winsor & Newton radial easel, but for this one, I decided to sit. I set up a small desktop easel on the dining room table and just... slowed down. It changed everything. I wasn’t bouncing around the room like usual. I was still. Focused. Calm. Qui, my girlfriend - was sitting beside me, doodling. We had the telly on in the background. The light was soft. It was one of those quiet, golden afternoons...
There wasn’t some grand plan or theme behind the painting. Like Boy in the Red Glasses, I was drawn to a reference image, specifically to the dreamlike expression of the boy’s face. I’m always looking for a certain kind of gaze, that curiosity and wonder that sits just behind the eyes. It’s never about copying the image. I start with it, but then I exaggerate wildly. I build the face through geometry and colour. I heighten everything. I enter my own Technicolor world - like Judy Garland stepping out of black-and-white Kansas and into Munchkinland. That metaphor from The Wizard of Oz has always stuck with me. It’s how painting feels.
The green hair came out of nowhere. Same with the green eyes. (Could have been a subliminal reference back to myself as I have green hair and eyes, who knows.) Only at the end did I realise he looked like Peter Pan. So I named him Pan. It wasn’t planned. It emerged. That’s how some titles come to me - after the fact, when I’m sitting with the finished piece and listening for who they are.
Emotionally, I don’t think about what I’m trying to express. I work in the same way I was taught to play music - intuitively, without theory. I play guitar and djembe by instinct and pattern. Painting is the same. I think in patterns. I feel my way forward without overthinking. And when I stop thinking, the work comes alive.
That doesn’t mean it’s easy. It never is. There are always arguments. Always moments where I hate it, love it, fall out with it, reconcile. I’m sculpting in oil - it stays wet for hours so I can keep pushing and pulling the paint, working it until the face finally breathes. One brushstroke can make it click. That’s the magic of it.
Looking back, I see how each of these paintings was helping me climb out of what I had gone though, grief. I didn’t know it fully at the time, but each one was a rung on the ladder back to myself. I was learning how to live again without Mum, my biggest fan, my lifelong champion. She was always so proud of my painting. I realise now that I was learning to paint without her being here to show it to. And I did. Pan is part of that gift back to myself.
Why share Pan ahead of the show? Because I want people to understand that these aren’t just pretty portraits. These are lived experiences. They’re memories. They’re healing. They’re energy. People always ask, “Who is it?” And the truth is, I don’t know. It’s not someone I know, it’s a presence that emerged through the act of painting. It’s not about the person. It’s about the process. It’s about what painting made possible for me.
In many ways, Pan is part of a wild, painted family. They’re all misfits - the mad brother, the funny auntie, the quiet cousin. I look at them now and they all feel related. They’re portraits, yes - but more than that, they’re soulprints of a time when I was learning how to feel again.
Portrait studies 2024
Oil on heavyweight paper
508 x 406mm
