Softest of mornings, hello

Recycled tissue paper, coffee grounds, coffee filters, turmeric, foreshore chalk on canvas.

81 x 100 x 1 cm

Unframed. 

This painting belongs to an ongoing series born from a visit to Oaxaca, Mexico ~ a city where colour isn't decoration but a way of life. It lives in cracked paint on sun-baked doors, in the deep amber of vast terracotta pots, in bougainvillea spilling over whitewashed walls, in golden light that drenches everything it touches. Arriving there in the depths of an English winter felt like a huge gift of colour and light and one that is overspilling into my studio practise since returning.

The golden warmth of the work comes not from paint bought off a shelf, but from turmeric, coffee grounds, recycled coffee filters and tissue paper, chalk gathered from the foreshore. Every ingredient is known, found, felt ~ more like cooking from scratch than buying a ready-cooked meal. There is something quietly radical about knowing exactly what is in a painting, about making colour from the earth and from the everyday, about the whole thing feeling like it was gathered rather than manufactured. The title borrows Mary Oliver's opening greeting to a morning ~ tender, unhurried, full of quiet wonder. That is exactly the feeling this painting is reaching for.