Earlier this year, I wrote about the work becoming quieter.
Since then, that quiet has settled more firmly into the paintings. It is no longer something I am noticing as a shift, but something I am working within.
The recent seascapes have made this clear. The focus has moved further away from the event itself and into what follows it. The tide has already turned. The weather has already passed. What remains is a kind of suspension — a space where the land and sky have not yet fully returned to equilibrium.
There is a particular stillness in these moments. Not absence, but release. The air feels held rather than moving. Light returns gradually, without direction. The horizon sits without pressure.
In these works, I am less interested in describing what is happening and more in allowing that space to exist. The shoreline becomes a point of quiet contact. The sky softens rather than builds. The paintings do not ask for attention in the way earlier works may have. They hold it differently.
What has changed is not the subject, but the timing.
I am no longer painting toward the weather, or even within it, but after it. In that space where everything has already occurred, and what remains is the trace of it.
This has brought a different kind of clarity to the work. Forms are more restrained. Colour is quieter, but more deliberate. The compositions feel less constructed and more allowed.
There is less need to resolve the painting into something definitive. It is enough for it to sit in that moment of return.
The quiet I wrote about earlier has not deepened so much as it has steadied.
