Influences
- 5 days ago
- 2 min read
The Harborough Artists Cluster Open studios were last month. This year there were 9 of us showing together, so we set ourselves up in the local church. To make it more 'open studios' therefore, I set up my wax pot and prepped a bunch of small cards to do some little mini works on. Working with people potentially talking to you, means concentration is not going to be a feature of the working day, so in the weeks previous, I wandered around taking photographs of things, printed them off, got them photocopied and cut them up to transfer into the wax, This resolves the issue, of what shall I paint and also "what was I drawing, when you asked me what I was doing?" scenario...
After lots of messing about, and yes quite a few things got completely wiped as I demonstrated something, oops, I turned out 9 little pictures. It was only the next weekend, visiting another artist's studio, that the statement, "you do landscapes, don't you?" came up- I realised that yes I had in fact only done landscapes... Never in my life have I considered myself a landscape artist, mostly because I associate landscape artists with a horizontal line 2/3rds or 3/4s of the way up a wide 'rectangle'. But it is so easy to forget how much we are influenced by our surroundings. I spend alot of time looking at open rural country, So when I haven't gotten something specific I want to convey, perhaps my default is landscape at the moment... which means I hope come September when I am back regularly in the city, I can embrace alot more juxtaposing diagonals, verticals and dare I say it more extreme curves, than the gentle undulating curves of the local hills.
(The 10th image above, is an experiment in at what stage to transfer a photographic image - the two green trees are the same image, fused into the wax at earlier or later stages, experimenting in varying the transparency of the image. I did not do the second one at open studios, as that required thought on processes. Which looks most like a cold wet windy Yorkshire hilltop? Neither!) My final intention is to be able to represent something altering over time, in one image, so I wanted to see the effect of laying an image over the top of earlier working... conclusion, the opacity of the print in the wax, is too heavy and there is too much loss in transparency).
