When I was young, I would wander. Down to the muddy creek at the edge of our road, a drainage ditch really, but I was small and my imagination large. There was waist high grass, met by tendrils of the weeping willow tree, into whose great rough branches I would climb. I loved to be held within the circling green, to be hidden, to dip my own roots, as the willow, into the source of quietude and renewal. Not that I understood it then, but I do now.

This sensate relation with the earth, lying prone and examining a single crocus, a beetle or following, in inky darkness, the passage of stars to their vanishing point; this innocence, this devotion, is manifest in children, as in poets and painters. Decades later, no longer young, I find the regenerative quality of spring evident in its eternal return in all aspects of my work. Each time I pick up a brush I am in the anticipation, the curiosity and the expectation of discovery. Once again, I have been granted the grace to begin anew, to start over.

Creativity, like the seasons, has its fallow periods, but each time I approach a new canvas I embody Spring. My intention, resonating through me from the time an unknown artist first placed their vermillion hand on a cave wall, is to affirm life.

Spring is the bursting forth, change and vigour of youthful exhuberance. My impatient self always searches for the first stalks of peonies pushing their red spears through black earth. Eagerly I anticipate the verdant green of leaves to come, and then, the perfume, the honeyed heaviness of unrivalled beauty. Gabryel Harrison