Emotional Work

Let there be no doubt about it: the true artist paints from the heart and with deep, genuine passion. Funny thing to say? Maybe, but after an enforced break from my creative life, caused by travel and other lovely things, the urge to paint returned to me with a vengeance.

It’s an artist’s job to experiment. What’s the use of churning out numerous similar pictures? If I wanted to work on a production line I’d do that (and get a proper job’s wage too) but I cannot, I follow my heart, my instincts, and paint what I need to paint.

This means that everything I create is unique, often vastly different from what I made last week; it’s individual, thought-out, personal, and born of an idea from a stage of living. What matters to the recipient of each painting is the emotional connection they make with it. What does it make you think of? There is something in that painting that appeals to you, that matters to you, that makes you feel right.

Experiment

Remember I told you about an experiment I was trying?
I'd seen a demo by a very experienced watercolour painter who was hailing the beauty of acrylics. I'd been aghast to watch her use exactly the same methods with this medium (acrylics) as for her usual watercolours! So I decided to try it myself. I painted some flower shapes on the white-primed canvas, with a (yellow-stained) rubber solution.

Then, when it was dry, I painted the background with an assortment of rich crimsons and cadmiums - this bit I enjoyed!

Then I rubbed away the rubber solution to reveal the flower shapes, but didn't like the three blobs below so began to put some marks where I felt there might be rocks ...

I didn't get much further than this when I decided it really wasn't 'me' and certainly wasn't the direction I
wanted my painting to take.

So this one is put down to experience and won't be visited again.

Pastels

I've been experimenting with pastels and, after an initial frustration with a small (A4) sheet of white paper, I took the bull by the horns and splashed out a small fortune on a pad of good 'pastel paper' in different shades, A3 size. This "Snowy Headland" was created on an indigo background.