The Retro Series - Women Who Were Never Asking for Permission

There is something about a woman on a telephone that stops me every time.

Not a smartphone. The other kind. The rotary dial, the payphone, the receiver that weighed something in your hand and demanded your complete attention the moment you picked it up. You could not half-listen. You could not scroll while talking. You committed to the conversation entirely, or you did not make the call.

I have been thinking about that commitment for a long time. About what it meant in that era, and in any era - to reach. To pick up the phone and say: I have something to say and I believe it is worth hearing.

That is what Dialing Back is about.

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The series began the way most of my work begins - with a feeling I could not yet name.

I kept returning to the image of the mid-century woman at the telephone. Not for the nostalgia of it. Not for the aesthetic, though the aesthetic drew me in as it always does - the composed expressions, the deliberate styling, the sense that every gesture was entirely intentional.

I kept returning because of what she represented.

The particular kind of feminine power that lives in patience. In preparation. In the choice of exactly when to speak and what to say. These women were not waiting to be called. They were not hoping to be chosen. They had already decided before anyone picked up on the other end that what they had to say was worth the call.

That is not a vintage idea. That is as contemporary as anything I know.

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There are three paintings in the series. Each one a woman, mid-conversation, suspended in a moment you are not allowed to enter fully. You cannot hear what she is saying. You will never know who is on the other end of the line.

That is deliberate.

The most powerful conversations, the ones that shift the direction of a life, that open a door previously closed, that establish once and for all that you are someone to be taken seriously - are private. They happen between two people and they belong to no one else.

The Weight of Connection is surrounded by soft pink florals, receiver held with quiet certainty. She is not gripping it. She is holding it, the way you hold something you have earned the right to pick up.

She Always Answered on the Third Ring. Not the first. Not the second. Always the third. There was ritual in it. Composure gathered. A decision made, in the space of two rings, about exactly who she was going to be when she said hello.

Long Distance Call stands at a payphone against a bold mustard backdrop, teal and warm tones surrounding her. She is poised, composed, her expression suggesting a story she fully commands. The distance in the title is not just geographical. It is everything she has crossed to be standing exactly where she is.

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These women are not relics of another time.

They are a reminder that ambition has always lived in women - quiet, deliberate, unhurried. That feminine power has never needed to be loud to be real. That knowing your own worth, and picking up the phone anyway, is an act of courage in any decade.

Dialing Back is on my website now. Three originals, each 75 x 100cm, each available.

If you recognize yourself in any of them - in the composure, the certainty, the quiet refusal to wait for permission - they were painted for you.

View the full Dialing Back series [here].