Over the past year, I found myself creating in a very different way. I’d been moving quickly — exhibitions, deadlines, expectations — and needed to give myself space to explore without pressure. So, quietly, I began painting under another name. It wasn’t about hiding; it was about allowing something new to unfold without the weight of what had come before.
The paintings that emerged were quieter, more internal. Trees, branches, shifting light — forms that were less about what I saw and more about what I felt while observing. They carried a stillness I didn’t yet have words for.
Looking back now, I understand that stillness differently. These works were born from moments where I was, quite literally, a passenger — watching the world move past the window, both as a child and later, travelling through France. There’s something in that sensation — being carried through motion, observing without control — that feels deeply woven into those paintings. Psychologically, it speaks to a kind of distance, but also to presence. The act of witnessing.
I’ve stepped away from painting recently, as I navigate a period of separation and change. Yet as I begin to find my footing again, it’s this introspective body of work that calls to me. And with that pull has come a realisation: I no longer want to separate the quiet from the expressive, the inward from the outward.
I paint to remember.
I paint to feel.
These two impulses have always existed side by side. One emerges from stillness and observation; the other from energy and emotion. They are not opposites — they are a dialogue.
I often think of Joan Mitchell and Georgia O’Keeffe as bookends of influence — Mitchell’s wild, intuitive freedom on one side, O’Keeffe’s distilled, almost meditative clarity on the other.
For a long time, I felt I had to choose between them, to be either the storm or the stillness. Now I see that both are part of me — both necessary, both human.
As Joni Mitchell wrote, “something’s lost, but something’s gained in living every day.” That line has been circling in my head lately — this idea of seeing from both sides now, of standing between what was and what’s becoming, and painting from that place of balance and truth.
So I’m bringing everything back under my own name, Rachael Mia Allen. Not as a restart, but as a recognition. Both voices belong here. Both are true.
This moment feels like a return, but also a beginning — to paint again from the centre of things, where stillness and movement meet, and where I can finally inhabit the whole of myself