 Sometimes it is the things you see every day which inspire you. A colour or texture catches your eye, and you're hooked. The itch starts, and you find you have to paint it. Whatever it might be. This happened for me a couple of years ago, when I was working with the lovely Vital Veg at Midmar. Every week I packed beautiful, colourful veg into veg bags for customers. Some of the veg came home with me. And some of that came with me to the weekly art class I was attending.  I wasn't aiming for still life. Nor was I trying to make an exact, photographic image. I was aiming, I think, for a celebration of deliciousness. I laid the veg (the larger the better, some soil was often present too) on a sheet of white paper on the table I was working at, with a large piece of (usually cartridge) paper beside it. I had seen that this was how the wonderful Elizabeth Blackadder paints her gorgeous flowers. I am a great admirer of her work, so off I went...  Another influence fed into this process. A few years ago, I attended a workshop with Sofia Perina-Miller, whose work I also greatly admire. She paints fabulous striking flowers, as well as many other subjects. She showed us how to paint directly onto paper, without doing any initial drawing. This was an entirely new experience for me - and I found that I loved the freedom of it! Instead of feeling constrained by the pencil lines, I was "free" to paint directly, loosely, using vibrant colours, which resulted in more lively work. Sofia usually adds meticulous pen and ink details to her work. I left mine as they were; as I may have mentioned before I have rather limited patience!  There is always a certain amount of fear involved in painting this way. I had to learn to be brave, to trust that the colours I was choosing and the marks I was making were strong and true and confident. This was no time for fiddling around with details and tentative marks. Before I started, I would look carefully at the veg, get a feel for the overall shape and size and proportions, the main colours, the shadows on the paper. Really look, and get a feel for it. It helped to stand up, to have everything I needed to hand and to just do it, quickly. I love this way of working; writing this makes me want to do some more of this kind of work.
Some of my veg paintings are available as digital downloads from my Etsy shop. Various items (prints, mugs, phone covers, tote bags etc.) sporting my veg paintings can also be found on Redbubble. All the paintings can be viewed in my gallery (most originals are available)
1 Comment
It's that time of year again, when my thoughts turn to putting together a calendar for next year. This year seems to have flown by. My age is creeping up on me, I suppose, and while it feels like it must only be about March-time, it's nearly the end of October and the clocks change tonight.
I had a sift through the photographs I've taken over the past year (and a few from the tail end of last year) and have been pleasantly surprised by what I have found. I tend to take a lot of photographs if I'm out and about somewhere - at the beach (any beach), out in the woods for a walk, down at Stonehaven for an afternoon, over on the west coast for a long weekend. It's easier to take pictures when you're on your own, I find. It takes more concentration than I used to imagine, to capture images that are worth looking at again later. And one tends to walk very slowly, looking at things along the way. Up through the trees, down at the shells in the sand at your feet, over at the rock formations of the cliffs or the rocky shore. The bit of the whole process I love most is the looking through the images afterwards. It's like opening presents - free ones, ones from myself to me. Gifts of memories, instants in time. The slope of a roof, the brilliant colour of flowers or leaves against an azure sky, the patterns made by lichens on old wood. With the help of friends and followers on Facebook, I've whittled the images down to twelve, for inclusion in next year's calendar. It was tempting to put two together, one of abstract images and one of purely flora, but I managed to resist. Time to get on and finalise the order - I'll let you know when they arrive! There is already a watercolour paintings calendar available for 2015, on the Store page.
I was lucky enough to spend a week in Andalucia in southern Spain recently. Having been there before at this time of year, I knew to expect an abundance of spring flowers. I wasn't disappointed. There were meadow flowers in abundance and around our house had been planted a wide range of familiar and unfamiliar plants. There is a lack of rain in the area, so regular irrigation is vital, to sustain any kind of vegetation. Of course we had slightly different views on precipitation while we were on holiday, but we could appreciate the work that is involved in sustaining a garden, or olive or orange grove. Let alone a whole avocado plantation. The flowers were vibrantly coloured, from the bright pink Bougainvillea to violet-blue daisies. Roses were also blooming. In April. The light and colour certainly lifted my spirits.
 Spring is finally here. Daffodils and tulips are blooming. And Forsythia and flowering currants, as shown in this photograph. There are tiny fresh green leaves appearing on the trees and the birds around in the woods are very active and vocal. It feels as if it has been a long winter, despite the fact that it was not very cold. We had a few snaps of frost and flurries of snow, but that was it. Today there was a lot of sunshine. Pigeons were frolicking on the rooftops. And now, funnily enough, we have chosen to travel abroad for some Mediterranean sunshine. There will be sketching, photography and plenty of book reading, I hope. I will be keeping an eye open for the flowers that are blooming there just now.
|
Archives
September 2024
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed