Summer Progress

Here are a few new pieces I've been working on over summer.

I wanted to continue introducing colour into my work, and also to build compositions which include some imaginative element and possibly some people in them.  I'm really inspired by art of the past here, and for 3 years or so since I visited a wonderful exhibition of Gainsborough landscapes at Compton Verney, I've been haunted, sometimes possessed, by the atmosphere of quietude and dusk in his landscape work.

I've been struggling with using this sense of wonder into my own work, and also to work at least partially from life, as most of my work until now has been made from photographs.

I've taken my tiny Moleskin or Derwent sketchbooks to work with me and drawn as and when I can, mainly while waiting for my train to and from work, or during my lunchbreak sitting in the sunshine listening to the radio (the Ashes have been a big part of my summer, as they have been in many summers over the past 10 years).

 From these sketches I have worked up a few pieces.  The first were tiny pieces which I made directly from my sketches.  In watercolour, pen and acrylic ink.  Here are a couple of these, sketches and the pieces made from the sketches. 

Wolverhampton Adult Education College

Sketchbook 11.7.13

Wolverhampton Adult Education College 

Drawing made from sketchbook July 2015

 

Wolverhampton Adult Education College 

Photocopy of drawing draw over and coloured with acrylic ink

Commuter Sketch July 2015

Commuter Watercolor Drawing made from sketch July 2015

But I really wanted to emulate the great art that I love.  I know it's not trendy, but I have to be honest.  Looking at a Gainsborough landscape, a Samuel Palmer, a Turner, a Caspar David Friedrich, fills me with such emotion that I really feel that now, life is too swift and too short to deny any longer that these are the artists I wish to emulate in my tiny way.  I'm not post modern, I don't get anything at all from a great deal of contemporary 'fine art', it just leaves me feeling like I've read a magazine and dumped it in the recycle bin.  I don't feel stained by it, coloured by it, altered by this art in any way. That is not to say that I denigrate it or disagree with it, but that I just does not touch me deeply.

 Surprised 

Pencil on Paper

Surprised

Watercolour (work in progress)