New stuff is coming!
New Paintings coming on May 27th!
Before I launch into this week's story, I just want to alert you to the upcoming release of a new body of work, The Connected Landscape. Last time the paintings sold quite quickly and I know some people felt left out, so this time I am giving you lots of notice. You will receive an email invitation on May 27th at 6pm. You will be able to view the work online before anyone else as the exhibition opens the following day.
The paintings will be for sale via the Inspired By gallery, where my exhibition will be held and you will be able to contact them directly from my website if you would like to reserve a painting. They will be employing a first-come-first-served system to make this as fair as possible.
So, if you think you might be interested, mark your calendar. I will also send out reminders closer to the date.
I'm excited to share these paintings as I think they represent my best work to date. There are 45 in total and they were made between October 2021 and March 2022.
In some ways they are a continuation of earlier work and in other ways they are a departure. Collage has played a large role in many of the works and I have expanded the range of sizes and shapes. I have also, in many of the paintings, left the horizon line behind and painted much more of an internal response to the landscape. I think these paintings are more expressive, more free and more "me" than almost anything I've made to date and that excites me.
Here are some sneak previews. These are details, not full paintings, but hopefully they give a sense of the energy and emotions in the work ...
How the series developed ...
I was asked to create the work for this exhibition and given the brief of 'abstract landscape.' I normally don't work with galleries, but this opportunity really appealed to me. The gallery is lovely and I would have the whole space to myself (there will also be ceramicists showing, but I have all the walls). I also liked the idea of being pushed to create so much work. It felt like a challenge and gave me a little fizz of excitement when I thought about it.
I began with a desire to be much more loose and expressive than in prior work and the first paintings took shape quite quickly. You might remember my very abstract Patternicity series ...
Collage was a key element in those paintings and I carried that forward into this series. I always find this happens - I build on what came before.
In some paintings, the collage was added here and there as I painted, but sometimes I layered collage as a base for the entire painting. I created interesting textures by removing paint as well as adding it, which meant using a lot of sandpaper and rubbing alcohol.
The collage elements never entirely make sense - there are words but often you can't read them. Or if you can read parts of them, they don't relate to the subject matter. This is an important idea behind the paintings. Because the landscape doesn't exist in isolation - as a beautiful thing to be looked at and painted and photographed and then left behind. The landscape is alive with the history of all the people who have lived there or walked there or even died there. Imagine, as we stood on an empty moor, if we could see all the words that had ever been spoken and all the thoughts that had ever been thought. The air would be thick and heavy with words for as far as we could see - and most of them wouldn't relate to the moor itself.
So our connection to the landscape is much more deep and textured than can be captured in a representational painting and in this series, I've tried to convey a fraction of that in each painting.
Collage does not appear in every painting, however, because sometimes our experience of the landscape is more pure. There are moments when we manage to shed all our 'stuff' and simply experience nature. Those times feel less weighted down, less dense, and I wanted to include those moments too.
And now they will go to the gallery ...
I'm excited to see the work in a new context. I don't usually work with galleries so I generally only see my paintings in my studio or occasionally I get a photograph of a piece on a wall in someone's home.
This will be different. The Inspired By gallery is a beautiful open space with white walls and wooden floors. Each painting will have room to breathe. The lighting will be good. I will see them anew.
I will be there for some of the hanging, but only to film the space so I can share it with you in a private view the following day. I won't be choosing what goes where - the gallery manager and her team will decide all that. I know some artists would balk at this, but I think it's important. As artists we don't have an editor the way writers do, or a producer the way musicians do. We usually decide everything ourselves. But this time I get to see my work through someone else's eyes - I get to have someone else decide how best to present it. I think this is a gift.
If you'd like to attend in person...
The show runs from May 28th to July 10th. The gallery is in Danby which is in the North York Moors national park, just a short journey from the coast.
If you don't know this area, you really should! The moors are vast and awe-inspiring with sweeping views and massive skies. Every now and then, you drop down into gentle green dales dotted with little stone villages. And out on the coast, you'll find dramatic cliffs, long cliff walks, seaside towns, and sandy bays where pretty coloured house pile upwards into the hillsides.
If you'd like to know more, you can look at the national park website HERE.
You can thank me later :)
Work Update ....
I'm now working on a series of new paintings. It's very early days but the idea has now crystallized (for me the idea usually comes somewhere in the midst of doing the work - I start blindly and just trust that it will all make sense).
Collage continues to play a role in these works but this time it's personal. (Isn't that from a film trailer? lol)
The items I'm using are personal - old journals, letters, cards, tickets etc combined with my favourite curated vintage papers, handmade collage papers, and old newspaper pages. The whole thing is layered with paint and collage and then sanded back to create amazing textures and little surprises. I so wanted that to be enough - I was telling the story of my life in collage.
But it just wasn't. I couldn't call this piece finished.
I find this so annoying! I would love this if someone else had made it. I would stand in front of it for hours discovering new things and be entirely entranced. And yet for me, it wasn't enough.
And that's when it dawned on me. I didn't want to stay stuck in my past. I want to enjoy the present moment and move forward into my future. This piece felt stuck and static and I don't want to be either of those things. I can't change the past but I can reclaim it. I can add hope and joy and anticipation.
So in one crazy 30-minute session, I set to work and made some dramatic moves. This painting won't stay this way - I don't know what will happen next - but I will always have this photograph to remind me of the moment I stepped out of the past and into the present