About Emma Procter

I'm an abstract artist living in Cambridgeshire, working mainly in acrylic.

Art has always been part of my life. My dad was an artist, and growing up around his work encouraged me to look beyond what was immediately in front of me. I've always been interested in colour, movement and atmosphere, and in what we feel or sense as much as what we can actually see.

Before painting, music was my creative outlet. I taught music earlier in my life, and I've always experienced sound in a very visual way. Music creates colours, shapes and movement in my mind, changing with its rhythm, tone and intensity. That connection between sound, colour and feeling has always felt completely natural to me.

I've also always been drawn to experiences that sit a little outside the everyday, and to those parts of ourselves and the world around us that aren't always easy to explain. I don't necessarily need to understand or define them. For me, experiencing them is enough.

Painting came into my life much later, during an incredibly difficult time for my family. It became a way for me to express some of the intense feelings I was experiencing as life continued around me.

What began from that very personal place soon became something much wider. Painting gave me another way to explore the things I feel, notice and experience.

I never begin a painting with a plan for what it will become. I may begin with a feeling, a memory or an atmosphere, or sometimes simply the need to paint. From there, I work intuitively, building layers, adding and removing, covering and revealing, responding to what happens on the canvas as the painting develops. Although the process is intuitive, every decision is considered.

I'm not interested in making every part of a painting feel comfortable or perfectly resolved. Sometimes it's the rawness, the unexpected marks or the areas that feel slightly unsettling that I find most interesting. I don't want to lose those things simply by trying to make everything look more harmonious.

I paint both in my studio and outside in my garden, surrounded by the Cambridgeshire countryside. The natural world inevitably finds its way into the work, sometimes visibly and sometimes simply through colour, movement or atmosphere.

Words are an important part of my work too. Each painting has a poem that accompanies it. Sometimes the words arrive while I'm painting and sometimes afterwards. The poems aren't there to explain what the painting means, but to sit alongside it as another part of the work.

I don't want my own story to decide what somebody else sees or feels when they look at a painting. Every painting has its own meaning for me, but what someone else sees or feels may be completely different, and I like that. Once a painting leaves my studio, it has a life beyond whatever brought it into being.