16th May 2026. I’d been thinking of auroras, hence the curtain of colours drifting down from the top of this A1 card. It’s very unlikely to stay this bright, but I do like a bright primary layer as a base so that I can let slivers of it show through. One of my recent paintings is of the bridge in the village, which has been in place since around 1100 CE, does that. People have lived here since 800 CE and it’s easy to imagine, almost to feel the presence of those lives when navigating the fields in the dark. How would an aurora be perceived? Who would interpret it? Eclipses, shooting stars, red sunsets, the full moon, all happened then as they do now, but our interpretations are based on science, technology, and systematic investigative methodologies not available to earlier populations. What gets us out onto the streets at silly-o-clock in the freezing cold to peer up at the sky is spectacle, not fear.

So here it is, the layer of glare.

I painted it flat in the first instance as I wanted a lot of water to sink into the card and to add fluidity to the paints. The materials comprise neon pouring paints, water +++, and paper towel roll to remove excess in the first instance and then to subdue the edges and definition. The area at the bottom is white acrylic, there mostly to provide texture and, with that in mind, there are strips of what I believe is called Architect tape – a kind of masking tape but comprising a grid of tiny squares formed by a systematised network of thread. I don’t know how architects use it.

I’ve just realised it reminds me of a wrap someone brought back for me from New Zealand years ago.

Found it! The colours are stronger, more saturated, but otherwise it’s pretty much the same palette.

19th May 2026. After circling this for a day or so, a landscape appeared. I’m not sure where it’s going yet, except to say it is both consistent and inconsistent with our local conditions. A slight extrapolation, you might say, from the reality. I’m not sure we often have fish in our skies, but that’s what I’m seeing now*.

For now, there are some compositional issues to manage; primarily the dark blue slashes across the top of the image which have neither painterly nor narrative consistency and I’m not sure why they’re there.

But – an idea is brewing. A ‘what if’ that can only happen in fiction.

20th May 2026. The idea brewed, boiled away, ended up looking like the window of an unoccupied building. This is extreme editing but, for me, represents another step forward in knowing when to persevere with something and when to start again. The idea was ill-formed and got no better. There have been distractions relating to building work, and I function better creatively when my frontal lobes aren’t buzzing with practicalities.

© Suzanne Conboy-Hill 2026

*I have form in this regard. Here’s Puddles Like Pillows from 2013’s Zouche Magazine https://zouchmagazine.com/puddles-like-pillows/