Tropical
Reverie

I had never been anywhere that dark before.

I had driven out alone to somewhere far enough from the city that the sky could actually be itself. This was something I had wanted to do for years, one of those intentions that sits at the back of the mind gathering a faint layer of embarrassment until one evening you simply do it. I packed a blanket and drove until the road became a smaller road and then stopped and sat on the grass and tipped my head back.

The Milky Way. I had seen photographs. I had painted a version of it, in fact, from imagination and from photographs, without fully understanding what I was attempting to represent. The painting existed before the experience, which is one of the stranger things about being a painter who also has a life.

I stayed outside until I was genuinely cold. Long enough for the particular silence of a field at night to stop feeling like absence and start feeling like presence. Long enough to feel the actual fact of the ground beneath me, a thing turning in a very large amount of nothing, and me on it, with my blanket and my paintings and my ordinary extraordinary life.

When I got home I could not sleep. I lay there thinking about the texture of it, the way the stars had seemed less like points and more like a wash of pigment dragged across wet paper. Like something that had been applied.

I set up at my table late. I wet the paper thoroughly, loaded the brush with the deepest ultramarine I had, and let it flood across. Then I took the salt shaker and dropped crystals from a height, scattered and uneven. Salt on wet watercolor draws the pigment away from itself, leaving pale halos where the crystals land. Small explosions of light pulled out of darkness.

Then I waited, which is the discipline watercolor demands above all others. You have to sit with the uncertainty of it. You cannot push it. You do what you can and then you let the water and the pigment do what they want, and sometimes what they want is exactly right and sometimes it isn't, and you never fully know until it dries.

This one was exactly right.

I don't entirely know why I cried. It wasn't sadness. It was something closer to recognition, the feeling of having seen something you already knew but had forgotten you knew. That the world is very large and very beautiful. That I had been carrying my brushes around for years, painting everything I encountered, and that this was not a small thing.

A few months later I moved to the UK to be with my partner. I brought this painting with me. It hangs above my desk now, in our flat, in this new country that is still teaching me its light. Some mornings, when the grey comes in and everything feels unfamiliar, I look at it and remember: I sat on cold grass once and the universe introduced itself. Everything since has been a continuation of that conversation.

The painting I made of cherry blossoms before I had ever seen one is one of my most honest works.

I painted Blossom Path before I moved. I had been looking at photographs of spring in England and Japan, the kind that circulate every year on the internet like a seasonal ritual, and I became preoccupied with the idea of a place where the trees did something so extravagant and so temporary. Where beauty arrived on a schedule and everyone stopped for it.

I painted the blossoms from imagination, which meant I painted them from longing. Longing has its own kind of precision.

The painting is softer than my usual work. I tend towards strong contrasts, dark ink lines, saturated colour. But the blossoms wanted to be diffuse, the pink dissolving into white at the edges, the path beneath them more suggested than described. The green was the green I imagined England to be, a very deep, slightly cool green, nothing like the greens I grew up with.

I moved to the UK to be with my partner. I arrived in the grey end of winter, which is perhaps the most honest time to arrive. No softening of the light, no blossom on the trees. Just the real thing, bare and cold and quietly beautiful in its own way.

My first English spring came in March. I walked past a park one morning and stopped.

The trees were doing exactly what I had imagined. Not precisely, the real cherry blossoms are more extravagant and more fragile than any image had prepared me for, but emotionally right. The softness, the diffusion, the sense of something very beautiful that you cannot quite hold. I had painted the truth of it before I had seen it.

Leaving home is not one event. It is a series of small recognitions, things you reach for that are not there, light that falls at the wrong angle, the absence of particular smells. And then, slowly, new things take their place. A park with blossoms I had already painted. A grey sky that turns extraordinary without warning. A flat that is becoming, month by month, a place I know.

I brought my paintings when I came. They are on the walls now, all the rooms of the atelier. Home came with me. It just took a little time to unpack.

I arrived in the UK carrying my paints in my hand luggage because I was not willing to put them in the hold.

My partner had been here for a while already and had found us a flat with good windows, which was the first thing I had asked about. Good windows matter more than most things when you paint. The light comes through and it changes everything about what you can see and therefore what you can make.

The light here was the first thing I noticed. Not bad, not wrong, just entirely different from what I had been painting with for years. It comes in lower, more sideways, filtered through cloud more often than not. It makes shadows softer and colours more muted and everything slightly more uncertain. I stood in our flat on that first day looking at my hands in the English afternoon and thought: I am going to have to relearn this.

Two weeks after I arrived, it snowed.

I had seen snow before, but lightly, briefly, the sort that vanishes before you have time to respond to it. This was real snow, falling steadily through the morning and settling on the rooftops and the pavement below and the bare branches of the tree outside our window. I stood at the glass for ten minutes without moving.

Then I got my brushes.

Snow is one of the hardest things to paint in watercolor because watercolor works by building colour on paper, and snow has no colour. It is white. But pure white paper with nothing around it looks blank, not snowy. The trick is to paint everything around the snow, the shadows it casts, the objects it settles on, the sky above it, and let the white paper carry the snow itself. You paint the absence. You build the negative space.

It took three attempts. The third found something, the blue-grey of cloud, the warm dark of the wet pavement below, the white paper allowed to just be the white paper.

I have been here only a few months. I am still learning the colour of the sky, the particular grey that isn't dull but is actually full of a kind of muted silver, the way the afternoon light turns everything briefly, unexpectedly golden before the dark comes.

Every place teaches you a new way to see. I am a student here, in the best sense. I arrived with years of painting behind me and a whole new vocabulary still to learn. I am paying very close attention.

Something in those images stayed with me and I have never quite let it go.

Warli painting is one of the oldest tribal art traditions in India, practised primarily by the Warli people of Maharashtra and dating back thousands of years. It is not a decorative art, though it is beautiful. It is a narrative art, a way of recording community life, rituals, harvests, weddings, the movements of animals and seasons. The figures are simple almost to the point of abstraction, circles for heads, triangles for bodies, lines for limbs. And yet you understand everything. A woman carrying a pot. A man climbing a tree. A group of people dancing.

What struck me was not the technique. What struck me was the confidence.

I decided to paint the women I heard gossiping. Not as an act of judgement. More as an act of documentation. Three women in the Warli style, flat and confident, arranged on a terracotta background that I mixed myself. I gave each one a speech bubble, and in the speech bubbles I wrote things I had actually heard, words that were meant to wound, things dressed up as concern.

The painting is called Whispers. It is one of the most honest things I have ever made.

What I understood, painting it, is that simplification is not a limitation. It is a choice about what to keep and what to let go. Warli painters kept the human figure and the narrative and let go of shadow, depth, and individual likeness. My painting kept the speech and the arrangement and let go of identifiable faces. The abstraction was protective, for the subjects and for me.

There is a long tradition of art made under conditions where direct expression is difficult. Art that codes its meaning, that speaks in symbols, that tells the truth sideways. Sometimes the flattest, most stylised image is the most truthful one. Sometimes you have to simplify in order to see clearly.

I still paint figures that way sometimes. Flat, arranged, telling stories without wanting credit for the telling.

Every lawyer I know has something they do that is not law. Mine has always been this.

I qualified as a lawyer and kept painting, which surprised some people and surprised me not at all. The two things had always run alongside each other. Long days of work, and throughout all of it, evenings at a table with a brush or a fineliner, making things that had nothing to do with any of it and everything to do with staying sane.

People sometimes ask which one I love more. I find the question difficult to answer honestly, because I am not sure they compete. They occupy different chambers of the same mind. The law requires a particular kind of attention, precise and relentless, tracking through arguments for the thread of logical failure, holding large amounts of information in careful relation to each other. Painting requires a different kind of attention entirely. Slower, more diffuse, open to accident, willing to follow something without knowing where it leads.

The Mandala Dragonfly came out of a particularly relentless week of work. I had not intended to draw a dragonfly. I had intended to draw circles, overlapping mandalas, the kind of repetitive pattern-work that quiets the mind without emptying it. I worked on it over three evenings with a 0.1mm fineliner, filling each small section with its own internal logic. At some point I looked at what I had drawn and realised the central form had become something with wings.

This is what I mean when I say the two things are not so different. The law, particularly common law, is a system of patterns. Precedents building on precedents, principles emerging slowly from the accumulation of individual decisions. Reading cases individually you see facts and outcomes. Reading them in sequence you begin to see the shapes underneath, the direction the law is always reaching towards. It is, structurally, not unlike watching a mandala emerge.

Both disciplines ask you to hold the immediate and the structural in tension at the same time. Both ask you to work carefully with what is in front of you while remaining aware of the larger form you are building. Both punish impatience. Both reward the willingness to sit with uncertainty longer than is comfortable.

I am a lawyer who paints. I am a painter who practises law. I have stopped trying to decide which is the real one. They are both the real one. They always have been.

The hardest thing to paint is something that is not still.

Most of my training was in still life. Objects placed on a surface, lit from one side, going nowhere. The discipline of still life is the discipline of looking without hurrying, of taking as long as the painting needs because the subject will wait. A glass bottle does not fly away. A bowl of fruit stays where you put it.

Birds are a different problem entirely.

I have been drawing birds since the very beginning. The herons in my first serious piece were still, standing in water, patient. That was the point of them. I chose herons because I admired their stillness. I painted what I understood.

The flamingo painting came from a reference I kept returning to for months before I touched it. Two flamingos at the water's edge, one standing, one in the full extension of takeoff, wings spread to their widest, every feather a separate decision made at speed. The standing one is watching. The flying one has already left.

What I understood, eventually, is that you cannot paint motion by trying to capture it. You can only suggest it. The wings are not every feather individually described. They are the impression of every feather, the way the eye remembers a wing rather than the way a camera records one. I had to stop trying to be accurate and start trying to be true.

The water behind them reflects a sky I invented entirely. The hanging roots at the top came from a garden photograph. None of it is the same place. All of it belongs together. That is another thing that painting teaches you, that truth does not require consistency. The feeling of a place matters more than its geography.

I finished the flamingos late at night. The one in flight had taken three sessions to get right. The moment I stopped correcting it and started trusting it, it worked. That is almost always how it happens. The painting knows before you do. You just have to learn to listen.

I started with the leaves.

That is always where I start with botanicals. The leaves are the architecture. They tell you where the light is coming from, where the shadows fall, what kind of world the flowers and birds will inhabit. Get the leaves wrong and nothing else can be right.

The monstera leaves in the Hummingbird Canopy took twelve layers of green to get right. Not twelve coats of the same green. Twelve different greens, each one dry before the next, building depth the way a forest builds itself, slowly and without any single moment you could point to and say: this is when it became real.

I had three hummingbirds to place. Each one needed to be doing something different. One feeding, beak inside a trumpet flower, wings invisible because of speed. One perched, still for just a moment, head turned slightly. One in transition, neither perched nor fully in flight, caught in the pause between one thing and the next. I wanted the painting to feel inhabited rather than arranged. As if the birds had been there before I arrived and would still be there after I left.

The calla lilies came last. I almost did not include them. The painting was dense already, full of green and movement and the dark jewelled bodies of the birds. But something was missing. A pause. A breath. The white lilies gave it that, their pale open faces providing stillness among all that life.

I think about this painting when things feel overwhelming. The twelve layers of green, the patience of building something slowly, the way each small decision accumulates into something you could not have planned from the beginning. A painting, like most things worth doing, cannot be rushed. It can only be worked on, steadily, until it is ready.

This is the painting I am most proud of in this recent series. Not because it is the most technically accomplished, though it might be. Because I did not give up on it when it was difficult. And there were several evenings when it was very difficult indeed.