Leading up to Christmas is always a difficult time to devote time to paint, but this year I managed to develop some pastel sketches into acrylic paintings. The original pastels were done very quickly during my stay in Suffolk earlier in the year and I thought had an immediacy about them that captured mood very well. My challenge was to replicate the broad, bold pastel marks into powerful paint strokes in acrylic paint. I think there was some success, but I feel that those on paper worked better than transposing them onto board as larger work. An interesting exercise and I will attempt to show some in a gallery show sometime.
The images of Suffolk stayed with me at the turn of the year and recently a couple more have surfaced as paintings – one has become the largest I have produced to date at 80 x 80 cm.
January has brought winter weather with a drop in temperature, and as a remedy to bring some brightness back, I turned my thoughts to some images I made as paint sketches during our holiday in the Greek islands last June. These were similar in some ways to the pastel sketches in Suffolk as they had a vibrant loose feel about them from the use of strong liquid watercolour paint. Again, I wanted to experiment to see if I could reproduce this same effect into large acrylic paintings on board. I really loved using the same technique as I had in the sketches by using large brushes filled with liquid paint onto a primed surface. There was no way I could use the easel for these so most of the work had to be done flat enabling the paint to spread in the way that produced a certain unpredictable patterns, but at the same time producing lovely gradients of dark to light in one simple stroke. Gorgeous!
Two shows – Linden Hall Gallery in Deal & The Iona House Gallery in Woodstock had some of my paintings in their Winter Shows, but both have now finished and one sold, so that was a good start to the year, but it was accompanied by the news that I will not be showing at Childwickbury this year, and as usual the 4 submissions to the Royal Watercolour Society Open were rejected again! Still plenty more opportunities to come so press on.
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