Studio Notes March - The physical Act of Painting
My Process…
Painting, for me, begins as a physical act. A kind of gesture or performance. It’s movement first — spontaneous, instinctive — where marks, stains, and colour all arrive on the surface at once.
Then comes the undoing. scrubbing back, removing, disrupting what’s just been made. It’s in that tension — between adding and taking away — that something more honest starts to appear. The real story isn’t immediate. It sits underneath, waiting.
From there, the process shifts. A slower back and forth begins. Adjusting, responding, letting the work move toward some kind of resolution — or sometimes not. Not every piece needs to settle.
On days when that physical intensity isn’t possible, the work changes pace. I move into quieter processes — stitching cloth, cutting and tearing paper, building collages. These moments feel just as necessary. They open up space for reflection, and often lead into new ideas or directions.
After all this time, I still come back to the beginning. Those first movements on the surface — the instinctive marks — feel like the most important part. They set everything in motion. The rest is a process of listening, and seeing where it leads.
— Jenny
Jenny Davis 2026
My inspiration…
Some things that continue to shape my practice—abandoned spaces, overlooked marks, shifting textures, and the quiet influence of nature and weathered surfaces. I’m drawn to surfaces that hold time. Over years of travel, I’ve documented fragments from both urban and rural environments—manholes, abandoned buildings, worn edges, incidental patterns—small details that often go unseen but carry their own visual language. These collected observations feed directly into the way I build and layer my work.
