This is a short video about an original oil painting, created in Cyprus from 2000-1, by myself.
She marks a transition, of moving from solitude and intensive self-inquiry, into collective living and co-creating. Being additionally immersed in Cypriot and Mediterranean lifestyle, environment, Nature, sunshine, was also hugely healing and influencial on my painting practise. Just moving from a cold damp flat in north-east Scotland, to a place where effectively I could paint day and night in shorts and a vest - it was powerfully liberating.
I also worked around Paphos as a life model for artists, and visited the beach a lot, which helped me come to a whole new relationship both with comfortably inhabiting my own body, and with freeing up my energy in relationship to painting the human body.
Cyprus seemed like a land steeped in spiritual Truth... I lived up in the hills outside the city; places still very much in the old world. I did a lot of walking out into the landscape, exploring hidden shrines, caves, pools. It was such a special few years, feeling sovereign and physically free-er than ever before, and throwing off the shackles that striving in the north had impressed on me.
See my catalogue - downloadable from my website claregalloway.com - for more information on this painting.
And see 
Follow my Art on Patreon, where you can support my creative expansion :-)