Why I Started Writing Poetry — and How It’s Influencing My Paintings

Welcome to this Lemon River Art, Newton Abbot blog post.

Poetry is a fairly new thing for me — something that started quietly, almost by accident, and has become an unexpectedly powerful part of my creative process. It began as a way to make sense of tangled thoughts and feelings I couldn’t quite speak out loud. I’d scribble a few lines in a notebook, not thinking of it as “poetry” at all — more like emotional shorthand.

But over time, I realised that these short, honest pieces were helping me put things into the world that I’d been carrying around for years. Grief, memory, relationships, longing — they started to take shape through words, and those words began to inform my paintings too.

Now, the two practices sit side by side. Sometimes the writing comes first and steers the painting. Sometimes it’s the painting that leads, and the words follow in its wake. They speak to each other. The poems hold a kind of raw truth — while the paintings explore the same terrain in a more layered, intuitive way. Both let me say something I couldn’t otherwise express.

In my Sitting With It booklet, the poems are gentle and reflective, touching on memory, loss, and connection. These themes are echoed in the paintings — in the marks, the textures, and the things I choose to hide or reveal.

Poetry has become a tool for noticing, for slowing down, and for getting to the heart of things. It’s helping me go deeper in my work — and also share more openly with others.

It still feels a bit vulnerable, putting words out into the world like this. But it also feels honest. And maybe that’s where the art really begins.