(image above Edwin Morgan in 1980 and proposed show title)

There comes a point when you stop asking what you should create and start paying attention to what keeps returning.

That is where I find myself this year.

Over the past few months I’ve found myself returning, again and again, to the work of Edwin Morgan. Not simply to read his poetry, but to understand how he looked at the world. Every time I opened another collection, another idea appeared that seemed to mirror the way I’ve been thinking about my own work.

It was never a conscious decision, it arrived quietly.

Morgan had an extraordinary ability to use nature and animals to explore human emotion. A bird was never simply a bird, a fox, whale or crow became something much larger. They carried fear, hope, loneliness, curiosity and resilience. He rarely explained these emotions directly, instead he trusted the reader to discover them.

That trust has become increasingly important to me.

Recently my work has centred on people, portraiture and studies of life have always fascinated me because every face carries a story. Every expression reveals something that words often cannot. I don’t intend to leave that behind, portraiture will always remain part of what I do because people continue to intrigue me.

This year, however, it will take a quieter place within my show.

Instead, I want to explore emotion through subjects that allow more space for interpretation. Nature offers that freedom and animals offer that honesty.

Unlike people, they arrive without pretence. We project our own feelings onto them and we often recognise ourselves in their posture, their movement and their presence. A lone stag standing against the weather tells a different story to a murmuration of starlings moving as one. A fox watching from woodland carries tension and intelligence. A hare caught in the open feels exposed yet determined.

These are not simply studies of wildlife.

They are studies of ourselves.

Morgan understood this instinctively. His poetry reminded me that the natural world is not separate from human experience. It reflects it back to us. That idea has become the thread running through my work in the studio.

As each piece develops, I find myself asking fewer technical questions and more emotional ones.

What does this animal say?

What does this landscape remember?

What feeling remains when the detail is stripped away?

Those questions have proved far more interesting than whether a painting is simply accurate.

Accuracy has its place, truth matters more.

This year’s show will inevitably reflect that shift. Visitors will still find portraiture among the collection but it won’t dominate the walls. Instead, you will encounter work inspired by the rhythm of the natural world and by Morgan’s remarkable ability to reveal humanity through subjects that are not human at all.

Morgan’s poetry has encouraged me to slow down, to observe more carefully and to trust that a viewer will bring their own experience to a piece of work. The works are becoming less about explanation and more about conversation.

If the work succeeds, I hope visitors leave with the same feeling I have whenever I close one of Morgan’s books. Not with all the answers, but with a heightened awareness that emotion can be found almost anywhere, if we are willing to look closely enough.