There May Be More to This Patchwork Thing Than I Thought
I have been painting patchwork fields for the last two years. Not because I ever decided that patchwork was a theme. I simply liked the shapes, colours and patterns of the land seen from above.
But today I looked around my house and began to wonder whether there might be rather more to it than that.
My sofa is patchwork. So are several of my chairs. There are rugs, cushions and even a piece of reduced curtain material I bought to make more cushions. Alongside them are paintings from my Weathered Dialogues series, with their shifting forms and colour blocks.
Separate areas of colour and texture
It is all there, fitted together to make a whole.
Most of these things have been in my house for years, long before many of the newer paintings. The chair furthest from where I paint is new, but the others are old. One of them—a yellow patchwork chair now living in the conservatory—was bought second-hand through Facebook Marketplace.
I remembered being given the address and driving along an old track, increasingly convinced the sat nav had taken me completely the wrong way.
It hadn’t. The chair was on a farm.
Oddly, until I mentioned where the chair came from today, the connection had never dawned on me.
I had driven down a farm track to collect a patchwork chair, brought it home, and then sat in it while painting patchwork fields.
Apparently the theme was there long before I noticed it.
