Thinking of my previous post in which I described the effect of an unnamed virus on my cognitive functioning and wondering how to give some kind of visual representation to it, I turned to Rebelle7, a digital painting app.

This allowed me to experiment with wet (digital) paint using the colours I hold in memory for that experience. The advantage of digital is the ability to stop and start the process, to freeze it, to undo a step or several, and to change brushes and media at any point. Also there’s no brush-washing housework involved! This is very dilute watercolour on Aquarelle paper and it’s showing me the flow of the medium where no tilt is in place.

Digital drips with a granular residue. Plain paper. This one has vertical tilt.

These two digital exercises have given me some thoughts about how to make a more gritty physical version of these shifting scenes.

Recommendation: the ideal musical accompaniment to watching paint drip is Max Richter’s Sleep, although it’s fair to say that these two won’t stretch to all eight hours of that*.

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Rebelle7 is made by EscapeMotions https://www.escapemotions.com/products/rebelle/about. The video is filmed using MultiCam Capture 2.0 by Corel and edited in Cyberlink’s PowerDirector.

Sleep by Max Richter, 2015. An eight-hour continuous piece with no speech performed live and broadcast on BBC Radio 3. Available on Spotify as 204 uninterrupted tracks. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/2kKSd5fKX5MkVNy5CRGjzv7/the-story-of-sleep.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2025

*I’ve just seen Brian Eccleshall’s exhibition of credit-card-sized paintings; beautiful, scary, tiny, miniature paintings collected into a doll’s house setting; and entertained the thought that perhaps I could make a short series of films and animations using my own work to accompany that performance. The obvious proviso is that I could not formally link the two due to copyright, so you’d have to buy your own, but I can guarantee it would see you through a thunderstorm or barking dogs!