finding out what you love

I wanted to share an experience I've been through recently. For the past few months I've been trying to rediscover what excites me about art. I've realised there's very much a difference between what I have the ability to do and what I actually want to do. I've spent a lot of time looking at other people's work, trying to work out what it is that excites me about the ones I'm drawn to and what I want to bring to life myself.

In the end, it was a short trip to Spain that caused a breakthrough. Taking myself away from a cold northern winter in Leeds to the Mediterranean was just what I needed. Seville is a beautiful city, full of warm colours and beautiful architecture, and our hotel had a roof terrace that overlooked the city. While it was cold in the mornings, by lunchtime it would be almost 20C and beautiful sunshine, and just feeling the sun on my skin was wonderful.

I also visited the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporeáno, a strange and wonderful place situated in an old ceramics factory, and found a retrospective of the painter Alfonso Albacete, whose work seemed to echo the wonderful colours I had seen in the town.

All this together, along with reacquainting myself with Matisse's paintings, has reawoken my passion for light and colour. I'm really excited to be trying new things and learning something new every time. And as I've worked on digital paintings of the roof terrace of our hotel, I've tried to inject them with the warmth I was feeling as I was sat in that very place.

It turns out what I needed was a bit of time - time to think, time to absorb what I was looking at and decide how I wanted to process that into my own work.

You can see some of my finished work from Seville on my main page, but here are a couple of photos I took while I was away, too - maybe they'll inspire you as well.