Between Two Points – Abstract Art Series

A series of abstract paintings and reflections on the spaces we all live between.

Introduction

Take any two points. They could be moments in time, then and now. They could be two people, separated by distance or years. They could be the person you were and the person you have become. They could be a memory and the fact that memory was made from. They could be the first day of your life and the last.

Between any two points, there is a space. And inside that space, if you look closely enough, if you are willing to sit with it rather than rush it, there is an entire world. A landscape of feeling, of experience, of everything that happened on the way from one point to the other. That space is what this series of paintings is about.

I came to this series as an abstract painter and abstract painting for me is the most honest way I know to translate feeling into something visible. Not to illustrate an idea. Not to tell you what to see or what to feel. But to create a surface, a presence, a visual atmosphere that carries something true. And then to step back and allow you to find your own way into it.

That is the particular beauty of abstract art and the thing I return to again and again in my own practice. It offers limitless possibility. A painting does not have one meaning fixed by its maker. It has as many meanings as there are people who stand in front of it. The feelings and experiences you bring to it become part of what it is. You are not a passive viewer. You are, in a very real sense, completing the work.

Each abstract painting in this series began with a feeling, with a threshold I have known in my life, a space between two points that I wanted to explore visually. And alongside each painting I wrote a blog post, a reflection on the same subject, in words rather than paint, in the same spirit of openness and wondering. The paintings and the words are companions. Neither explains the other. Each one simply offers a different way into the same territory.

The five subjects I chose, time, connection, distance, memory and the arc from youth to age, are my own interpretations of what it means to live between two points. They come from my own experiences, my own looking, my own long sitting with questions that do not resolve cleanly. But they are not the only interpretations. They are not even, perhaps, the most important ones.

Yours could be.

Because between any two points in your own life, there is a landscape that only you have crossed. A distance only you have measured. A feeling only you know the full weight of. And when you stand in front of these paintings or read these words, I hope something in them meets something in you. Not because I put it there. But because you brought it with you.

There is one more thing worth knowing before you step into the series. The abstract painting you see here contains all the colours I have used across the five paintings. Black, white, gold yellow, warm pink and blue-grey.

They appear here in their original, unmixed form. Each one carries its own feeling, its own meaning, its own particular association for me as the painter. They are the palette of a life, if you like, the emotional colours I reach for when I am trying to say something true.

In each of the five paintings that follow, these colours are mixed, layered and combined to serve the focus of that specific subject. They grey of time bleeding into the gold yellow of memory. The warm pink of human connection softening in the blue-grey distance. The black of fact sitting beside the white of what we only half remember. The mixing is where the meaning is made, where one feeling meets another and becomes neither of them was alone.

So as you move through the series, you might find yourself noticing the colours not just as visual elements but as a I have been making work.

Take your time with each painting. Sit with it. Let it ask you something. And when you are ready, reflect on what Between Two Points means to you. I have a feeling it means more than either of us can say.

The Series:

• Between Then and Now
• Between Two People
• Between Distance and Time
• Between Memory and Fact
• Between Youth and Age