Balance In The Chaos

I’ve had this phrase somewhere near me for years. Balance in the Chaos. It started as a title. Then it became something I kept coming back to, in the studio and outside it, until I realised it wasn’t just a title — it was a description of how I actually want to live.

Chaos isn’t the problem. Chaos is the condition. The canvas is chaos before you start. The day is chaos before you decide how to meet it. Every conversation, every idea, every relationship starts in motion, unresolved, slightly overwhelming. The question isn’t how to calm it down. The question is how to be alive inside it.

Yoga and meditation gave me a language for this long before painting did. In meditation you sit with everything that’s arising — thoughts, feelings, noise, restlessness — and you don’t fight any of it. You just watch. And slowly, without you doing anything, things start to settle. Not because the chaos left. Because your relationship to it changed.

Happiness isn’t on the other side of the chaos. It’s the quality of attention you bring to it.

Painting is where I feel this most directly. I work with a lot of energy on the canvas. Layered, pushed, colours arguing with each other. And somewhere in that mess there’s always a moment — sometimes you have to be patient for it — where the whole thing clicks. Not into stillness exactly. Into a kind of aliveness. A spinning top moving so fast it looks still.

That moment is joy. Pure and uncomplicated. Nothing to do with how the painting looks, whether anyone will want it, whether it’s good by any measure I can name. It’s just the experience of something being right. Present. Itself.

Art for me is every moment. It’s the light on the wall in the morning. It’s the way a chord resolves when you weren’t expecting it to. It’s the smell of oil paint and linseed on a fresh canvas. It’s a meal cooked slowly and eaten without distraction. It’s movement, music, colour, silence. It’s not a category. It’s the whole of being alive to what’s happening.

The chaos is always there. I’ve stopped trying to resolve it. Instead I try to find what’s stable inside the motion — what stays clear when everything else is moving fast. That’s the balance. Not a destination. A practice. Something you find and lose and find again every day.

Balance in the Chaos. It’s usually there. You just have to be present enough to feel it.

Oil on canvas — the moment before a work resolves