Finding my voice

My Residency Journey with Emily Ball

Three weeks in January. Six artists. And an unexpected obsession with black…

A month before my residency with Emily, I had no idea what I wanted to work on. This wasn't new, I’d always struggled during painting courses and in my own studio, losing track of why I was doing any of it. I'd get halfway through a painting, having had moments of clarity, but they'd vanish like butterflies. That's what I used to call them: butterfly thoughts. They'd dance around me, fleeting, tantalising, but I could never grasp them or hold them still.

I once wrote about T.S. Eliot's "still point of the turning world," that quiet centre where movement and calm meet. Creativity often starts there, in a pause. But I was having trouble finding that stillness, let alone keeping it.

Then, in the weeks leading up to the residency something shifted. I realised I just wanted to play with colour. To start a painting by looking at my pile of oils and asking: What colour am I feeling today? Then responding to that colour with another, seeing how they feel together, sitting alongside each other, layered through, piled on top.

I did a study on paper, and it became a small revelation. All I did was play: paint, colour, flowers. I realised I wanted to explore floribunda shapes, to finally embrace something feminine and unashamed. To say, simply: I delight in being a woman.

Part of this breakthrough was understanding what I feel when I'm out in landscape and nature. It's deep emotion. At the sea, it's the colours of sky, water, and land, where they all meet. The lines between shapes. The small things that pop up when I look around and notice.

In woods, the same. Different greens, the blue of the sky, the drama all of it creates inside me. How tiny things sit within the monumentality of the whole. Pattern upon pattern. I've always loved pattern - Indian woodblock cottons with their rich, layered colours are my favourite.

And I understood, finally, that I can make these trees and landscapes and flowers do anything I want. Be any colour I want. Because these are my paintings. I released myself from the expectation of pleasing others. I just wanted to make work I loved.

During that residency, I painted mainly on Arches oil paper. It felt cheaper, smaller, less loaded with the weight of a stretched canvas and this was liberating. I could keep creating, inventing new shapes, leaves, flowers. Stripes where I wanted them. Dots and dashes. Lines threading through, leading the eye around. Some paintings came easily; others needed reworking and brave decisions. But there was always that quiet confidence underneath: I can do this. I know how to do this.

I felt I finally knew who I was. And that I no longer needed all the classes I'd loved. It had taken fifteen years since graduating, but I'd come into my own. I remember meeting an artist in Totnes just after I finished my degree and asking how he'd reached the point of opening his own gallery. He said it had taken eight years of painting constantly and faith that it would happen.

I haven't looked back since.

Black Envy…

The three-week residency in January was extraordinary. Six artists, all working on wildly different things. During Week Two, I developed what I can only call black envy. Two of the others were using a lot of dark paint, and I wanted in.

I mixed my own black: Indian Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, and Prussian Blue, all transparent pigments. The contrast between these darks and my bright flowers was startling. It highlighted something I'd been circling; the poisonous, toxic nature of angel trumpets. The transparency meant I could shift the base colour towards blue, green, or red. With copious amounts of solvent and stand oil, I could thin the paint right down, drip it, layer it, thicken it. It created a real sense of depth.

I borrow constantly; flowers, shapes, leaves, stems, branches from books, photos, memory. I weave them together into tapestries and patterns.

Why Residencies Matter

I have come to realise these residencies give me something I struggle to find at home: space, freedom, time. Collaboration, thinking, experimenting, discussion, critique. They let me push my own boundaries without distraction. My own studio is too open to interruption, from myself, from others, from the demands of daily life.

Here I can just be myself. And paint.