Every painter knows the experience of stalled momentum — the studio that feels resistant, the canvas that offers nothing back. This post reflects on what that state actually is, and on the particular discipline of returning to work not when inspiration arrives, but before it does.

'Shallow Lands' 100 x 100 cm Mixed Media on C Paint can be applied with almost anything that will hold it. I rarely use brushes in my current work — not from any aversion to them, but because working with brushes alone tends to return me to a familiar repertoire of marks and painterly qualities that become predictable over time. The introduction of unconventional materials and tools has been both liberating and demanding, opening up surface possibilities that a brush simply c