Love Stories

Archive / Projects

What I Paint About When I Paint About Love! is a series of sixteen small works on paper made during a period of personal transition. Taking its title from Raymond Carver's collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, the series reflects on the fragile narratives we construct around intimacy, memory and expectation.

Rather than illustrating particular events, the paintings use fragments of experience as points of departure. Each title hints at a story without ever fully revealing it, inviting the viewer to complete the narrative for themselves. Like Carver's writing, the works are less concerned with romance than with the ambiguities, humour, disappointment and resilience that accompany human relationships.

The series also marked a return to painting after several years in which my practice had focused on image transfer, repetition and conceptual process. Although modest in scale, these works re-established painting as a place where lived experience could be transformed rather than simply described. They became an important bridge between Repetitions and the increasingly painterly investigations that followed in Submerged.