Back in the 90s, I came across complexity and chaos theory. I read into it as well as I was able to and connected it to my academic research into language in use, realising it could work best as metaphor. It has since become for me a powerful way of thinking too about life’s mysteries and practicalities. Once we accept that things are always changing, including ourselves, and that much of the world operates as if connected in dynamic systems, we start to see beautiful phenomena related to change everywhere: becoming rather than being, trajectories across landscapes of possibilities, attractors, the edge of chaos where everything is in flux, emergence of something new and different, phase shifts where a whole systems shudders into a new way of becoming.

Lately things have been shifting in some of these complex ways, and in this post I share what that seems to mean for my painting.

I have also been having an 'Agnes Martin moment'.

Agnes Martin was an American painter who, at the age of 55, moved away from New York, and spent roughly seven years wandering and living in solitude in New Mexico before returning to painting. Her work following that period became the delicate grid paintings she is now known for. I paint with my back to the world is the title of her key painting series, of a fascinating documentary and, most recently, of a thoughtful collection of poetry responding to her painting by Victoria Chan g.

In my own 'Agnes Martin moment', I have spent weeks and months with my back to the world in a busy city, letting myself be present, seeking out my changing self and an understanding of what kind of painter I want to be now. Contented days, and uncomfortable days.

I tried to listen even more carefully, deeply, to my inner self. I let earlier assumptions and expectations drop away, until I was left with the raw and the continuing. And with these true things clarified and adopted as commitments, I returned to painting.

**I love the feel of paint moving across and into a surface, especially heavy watercolour paper.**

*I want to float in turquoise seas*

**I love colour, how it can be varied and placed and looked into.**
*Take your time, love your days.*

**I love working with my intuition to let the new and unexpected arrive on the surface**

*All I got was the sky*

and to work with what arrives until it turns into ‘a painting’, some coherent, congruent whole that becomes a landscape of possible meanings for others to walk across as they will, gathering their own interpretations, pausing at their own viewpoints to sit and look towards the horizon.

*Attention holds the space*

Four true things to hold on to as I returned to the next phase of painting. Strong enough for new paintings to start to emerge - you can maybe spot the path through the shifting. The Illusions painting that opens this post was a bridge into the new phase with its bounded forms emerging out of the layered background. I close with one of the new paintings from the other side of the phase shift.