Do you know who you really are?

“Art is the stored honey of the human soul.”
– Theodore Dreiser

Do you know your themes?

If that seems a weird question, bear with me. All great artists have themes that run through their work. Anyone who studied literature in school has been asked to identify the themes in a novel or poem. And those same themes probably appeared in other novels or poems by the same writer. Because a writer can't help but return to his or her central interests, passions or concerns.

The same is true of music: Bruce Springsteen writes over and over again about loneliness and struggle and the loss of hope. These themes have appeared in his work for over 50 years.

I think it's essential for an artist to understand his or her own themes. Doing so helps us make decisions about our work. We can choose colours and tools and marks based on what we want to say. We can make bold shapes or small ones, choose abstract or representational (or somewhere in between); decide if we will paint or draw; choose big or small ... the list goes on. When we know our fascinations, we make decisions more easily.

This came to mind as I was restoring an old cupboard.

Wait ... what?

Bear with me - it will all make sense!

I'm having some work done in my bathroom and I wanted an old cupboard to use as a vanity unit. I scoured eBay and Vinterior looking for just the right thing and couldn't find it. Then my friend turned up at my door carrying an old pine TV cabinet that he found in his garage.

It was orange pine, but it was just the right shape, so I set to work turning it into what I wanted. I wanted the cabinet to look as though it had been painted many times over the years and as if it had been scuffed through natural wear and tear.

First I painted it in several layers of blue, brown and yellow chalk paint. Then I covered it all over with a final layer of light grey. Once it dried, I began to distress the paint with sandpaper and a furniture scraper. That's when I came alive!

I didn't mind painting the layers - but I got genuinely excited when I started to remove paint to uncover the previous layers. I loved the surprises that happened - things I could never have planned.

Of course, I also love doing this with my paintings. I build up layers and then scrape or sand back to reveal some of what came before.

It's the sense of history that I love. And this love of history is something that has always run through my life. I don't mean that I love studying history in an academic way - but I have always loved walking through old ruins or scouring antique shops. I get a genuine thrill from being surrounded by old things, whether they be old stones in a wall, or vintage books, or antique furniture.

I also like researching people's lives. I buy a lot of vintage ephemera from ebay (old letters, ledgers etc.) and if there is a name and address, I'll often go onto Ancestry.com and try to learn more about them. It's a thrill to think these long forgotten people have been uncovered again.

I think I've always known this is one of my core themes but that old cabinet really brought it home to me. It means that the sanding and scraping I do has an extra layer of meaning now and brings a kind of depth to my work. It's also inspiring some ideas about what I make make next and why.

I suppose it's entirely possible to make art without knowing what you're saying or why you're saying it. But I think art-making is so much more rich and meaningful when we take the time to figure it out.