The Structure Beneath the Surface

On stone, stories and the language of the paintings

Coagula (2026)

I am often asked what my paintings are about, and the honest answer is that they are about several things at once, layered over one another in much the same way as the paint. So, I wanted to write a little about where they come from and the threads that run through them.

It begins with stone

Most of my paintings begin outside. I live and work in the North Cotswolds, where the limestone holds iron in its grain and the light moves across it differently at every hour, and I start many mornings walking along the Cotswold Way while the day is still settling. The cream passages of stone I pass, warmed in places by rust, are the grounds my paintings are built on, and I think something of that slow, weathered patience finds its way into the studio.

Listening for the story underneath

I have worked in psychiatry for thirteen years and I am a registered integrative psychotherapist and occupational therapist. In the therapy room I listen to the stories people tell and witness them finding meaning in their own narrative, including the parts of themselves that have been abandoned or lost. Much of the work lies in bringing those parts back into the light and helping them find a way to live alongside one another, so that they might find a transcendence and a new relationship with their experience.

Over the years I have learned that the meaning we first settle on is often not the deepest one, nor the one that most needs our attention, and that a story is rarely about the thing it seems to concern, which can lead us away from what lies underneath and from the chance to transcend it. Abstract painting works in much the same way. What we see sometimes resists words altogether and reaches us only as a feeling, a deep knowing or a shift of state, and that is the quality I look for in the studio.

Layers, scraped back

The paintings are built slowly, in layers of modelling paste, dark grounds, glaze and cream, which are then scraped, sanded and scratched back so that earlier marks rise through the later ones. When you spend the time to look, nothing is entirely hidden and nothing is entirely revealed as it is all connected, which feels close to how I understand people.

Over that worked surface I place areas of visual hooks and structure: weighted black forms, small fragments of colour and fine lines, positioned on the proportions of the golden ratio, the same proportion found in shells, seeds and the spiral of growth. In most of the paintings two forces meet, a window of moving colour and the fixed geometry around it, and the work lives in the balance between them.

That meeting of chaos and order is, I think, the central skill of abstract painting, and perhaps of being human too. Too much order and a painting, like a life, becomes rigid and lifeless. Too much chaos and it cannot hold its shape. The work is in finding the balance between the two, letting the loose, felt marks move freely while giving them enough structure to stand on, and it is not something learned once. Each painting asks for it again, often through many layers of getting it wrong, scraping back and trying once more, and life seems to ask the same of us, iteration by iteration, as we learn to hold both the order we build and the chaos we cannot avoid.

Old stories, still alive

Myth and legend run through the titles, from Greek philosophy and its healers to the cosmology of ancient Egypt, medieval epic poetry and the imagery and symbols of many belief systems.I return to these old stories because they remain so closely entwined with the human psyche. They are woven into the language we still use and the films and stories we still tell, and they have a great deal left to teach us. I feel most aligned with the thinkers who read alchemy as a map of inner transformation and saw in recurring symbols a shared, collective layer of the mind.

Maat, the ancient Egyptian goddess of truth, balance and cosmic order. Her ostrich feather was the measure against which the heart was weighed.

My painting Maat takes its name from her. It holds its forms in quiet tension, weighted black against open cream, and it was made alongside Fulcrum, so that when the two hang side by side the space between them becomes the point of balance.

After Gustave Doré, illustration for Dante’s Divine Comedy (1860s), hand-coloured. Dante and his guide Virgil beneath the stars.

Once Again We Held the Stars comes from the last line of Dante's Inferno. After the long descent through darkness, Dante and his guide climb out and see the night sky again: "E quindi uscimmo a riveder le stelle", "and thence we came forth to see again the stars." I have always loved that moment of return, when after a hard passage the world opens out and we can look up again.

Two of my newest paintings take their names from alchemy. The alchemists worked by the instruction solve et coagula, to dissolve and then bind together again, and they understood that every real change asks for both. In Solve, a black column stands on a ledge that runs out of the canvas, the red line rises from it and warm rust drifts upward through the ground, as if something solid were beginning to loosen and lift. In Coagula, the black settles low and heavy, colour breaks through its top like light through a torn surface and a heart is pressed into the ground, gathering what remains into something new. Hung side by side, they hold the two halves of the same movement.

A language of symbols

Alongside these stories runs a quieter language of symbols that recur from painting to painting:

• The window, a portal to something deeper, where emotion and energy are always moving beneath the ordered surface of a life

• The hidden eye, watchers waiting to be found by whoever comes close enough

• The crack filled with gold, where the place of damage becomes the place where something precious shows through

• The still centre, where lines cross and the rest of the painting turns around it

The red line

A section from 'Out of the Fire' (2026)

A single red line runs through the work. In alchemy red marked the stage at which separate parts were brought together, but the work was never finished only once, and every completion became the ground for the next turning. Plato described something similar in his allegory of the cave, where people sit facing a wall and take the shadows passing across it for the whole of reality. Change begins with what the Greeks called periagoge, a turning around, when someone looks away from the shadows towards the source of the light. What I find most true in the story is that the turning is never done only once. We keep returning to the cave and we keep having to turn again, each time seeing a little more of what was there all along. The red line is that thread of continuity, carrying a story from one turn to the next without quite arriving.

Two series and a bridge

The work moves between two series. The Still Point is open and restrained, a few forms weighed against a great deal of quiet ground. Palimpsest is layered and dense, with fragments and earlier surfaces rising through the paint. Asclepius, named after the Greek god of healing, sits between them as the bridge.

 Asclepius (2026)

If you would like to see the paintings in person, my work is shown with the Sixteen Gallery collective in Cheltenham and stocked by Trove Home Collective in Broadway, and you can see what is available at emilymitchellart.co.uk.