What could you try for the first time?
Try Something New
Creative risks come in many forms — heat, wax, sunlight, and water. Notes from the studio on what I might try next.
I’ve no intention of jumping from planes or base-jumping from cliffs — though there was a time I’d have contemplated skiing down the side of Everest. These days, my risks are creative ones. The kind that involve heat, pigment, pressure, and light rather than altitude.
Encaustic Painting (Beeswax & Pigment)
A luminous, sculptural medium used by Jasper Johns and many contemporary nature artists. You layer molten wax and pigment, fusing them with heat — perfect for tree bark textures, rivers, or the “living surfaces” of imagined worlds.
I’m especially drawn to the photo-encaustic work of Thomas Dodd (born 1961 — a near-contemporary), who fuses photography with layers of wax and pigment to create surfaces that hover between dream and reality. The process feels alchemical: building light, not just painting it.
Cyanotype and Anthotype Printing
These early photographic processes use sunlight — blueprints or plant-based emulsions. I can imagine printing leaves, pond weeds, or even Watersprites silhouettes in the sun. I’ve just watched a lovely how-to video from Handprinted, which has given me both ideas and the impulse to try. There’s something deeply satisfying about letting time and sunlight co-create an image.
Collagraph
A relief/intaglio hybrid using textured materials glued to a plate — string, fabric, leaves, sand — then inked and printed like an etching. It’s tactile and layered, somewhere between my lino discipline and a painter’s freedom. I’ve one half-finished already, card and glue assembled, waiting patiently for ink. Time to complete it and see what it teaches me.
Projection Art / Light Box Assemblage
Light boxes that integrate drawings or prints with projected video or backlit film — a natural meeting of my producer’s instinct for atmosphere and the printmaker’s love of texture. This could easily extend the world of Watersprites — perhaps even as an outdoor installation. A way of fusing story, movement, and light.
Monotype with Water Media
This one I could try today. I have Perspex sheets and inks ready. Rolling out ink, drawing into it, transferring once — one take only, painterly and immediate. I’ve made monotypes before, but not this way. I don’t have a press, but perhaps slabs of stone or hand pressure will do the job. The unpredictability is part of the fun.
Motion-Drawing
Art made from movement itself. I imagine a roll of paper, twenty-five metres long, stretched along the pool balcony. As swimmers move below — especially our best butterfly swimmers — I’d walk the length of the pool, drawing in rhythm with their strokes. The result would be a kind of kinetic calligraphy: the motion of water, body, and breath traced in ink.
Plaster or Papier-mâché Relief
I’ve begun small experiments in modelling clay and papier-mâché to understand how companion trees grow together. There’s a particular beech and oak in Markstakes Common that fascinates me — decades, perhaps centuries, of shared endurance. I’ve captured them in print and collograph, but I now want to shape them in three dimensions. My first sculptural “Tree Man” — touchable, textured, alive.
Trying something new doesn’t always mean leaping into the unknown. Sometimes it means following a familiar thread into another material — light into wax, movement into line, or imagination into form. These processes all offer one thing I never tire of: the chance to learn through making.
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