Life's a Carousel

I have been working on a new body of work titled Life's a Carousel, the theme being carousel animals and the Celtic year representing the main eight Luna festivals the Celtic year beginning with the festival of Samhain more conmanly known as Halloween, which will soon be upon us.

This time of year is the Celtic New Year and is always a time of reflection, looking forward and letting old emotions from the year die away. Symbolically it is often represented by fire as it is traditional to have bonfires at this festival.

The Celtic year is often drawn as a circle divided into eight equal parts. I have always been drawn to the aesthetic of the carousel with its grand and whimsical carved horses and lights I have been wanting to use the theme for a new body of work for some time now, knowing I also wanted each Carousel animal to represent some kind of emotive driven iconography. I have chosen the Celtic year as I feel the two themes will blend well, given the motion of the carousel turning as correlating to the motion of death, regeneration and new birth the wheel of the Celtic year embodies. The scope for an emotive personality in the character and imagery these new works can contain will be my focus exploring the personality of the seasonal festival and its attributes.

I'm currently working on sketches for new paintings exploring ideas and imagery around these themes not all of these will make the cut and much editing will be done before I commit to my final imagery for the new work.

I will be combining the marbled canvas I have been working on as a starting place for this new mixed media work. I like the introduction of this spontaneous element to painting, I feel the marbling imagery brings a fluid and motion to the work which echos a sentiment of pictorial metaphysical narrative spaces.

 Samhain imagery with a goat a witch and her broom.

Imbolc (May-day) imagery represented by frog

 Marbling onto raw un-primed canvas and them coated with clear gesso with fine marble dust, to give a smooth surface with a gritty tooth for working onto.