These paintings have been my journey over the last 9 years – spanning the time of coming to the end of my work as a psychotherapist and starting my life after work, retiring.

I have had to Embrace and Connect with how and who I am now, a time after studying and working and achieving in a younger, former world. In some ways, a world I hardly recognise now. I am a war baby, a baby boomer. We didn’t get TV until I was 12, and it was a huge thing. High tech! Laughable now.

I am a generation that played outside on our bikes in the streets until it got dark and our mothers called us inside for supper. We walked to school, or took a bus. There were always jobs, and I got my first one at 13 shelving books at the local library, the money helping my (single) Mum with buying clothes. We played games in the evening and read books and visited friends. That big clumsy old fashioned telephone and letters were how we communicated… how last century!

These paintings are a way I have kept my focus and started to find a new direction for myself. Through reflections, writing poems, keeping a daily diary, and attending to my dreams and my unconscious drawing processes, I have steered and journeyed my way through the wild and uncharted storms of my newly untethered life to find a way to be with myself as an older person in a younger technological world.

These paintings (and also my poems) are my maps, and I have stayed faithful to them, letting them speak to me and guide me to a new place in myself and how I see myself in the world now.

I have Embraced and Connected. My paintings and I greet you.

Caroline Bensinger

Titirangi, June 2023