“January Greys”

So the UK has been in lockdown since the start of the year - and I’m sure anyone reading this will be very familiar with that dull, heavy feeling of lockdown fatigue. Spending the darkest & coldest month of the year stuck inside and distanced from other people wasn’t a fun ride for any of us.

And I guess I just needed to express that? I never purposefully set out to put myself in my paintings - but I realised halfway through sketching this that I was pretty much drawing a full-on self-portrait… so, just kinda ran with it. It was definitely” art as catharsis” for this one, I think.

Speaking of the sketch - this was doodled up sometime in January (hence the title) when the fatigue of a third Lockdown felt heaviest.

(You might recognise it from last month’s sketchdump post!)

From a technical standpoint, it was actually a really interesting change to make a painting that wasn’t centred on a face - or barely featured a face at all; I could focus more on the light and atmosphere of the painting as a whole. And painting clothes and fabric folds is something I don’t do often either, so that was a fun challenge!

(Also, I can happily report that a lot of the heaviness is feeling much lighter now - I hope everyone else is managing okay through these difficult times!)