Inspiration in The National Gallery, London

That I can walk in off tree street in London and stand in the National Gallery a metre away from Turner’s Fighting Termeraire or Van Gogh’s sunflowers with out special arrangements, or payment or protective screens  between me and the paintings is just so hard to take in when everything else is so commodified.

Recently I saw Colin Davidson’s powerful, deeply sad portraits of people, all of whom had family members killed in The Troubles in Northern Ireland at a time when I still lived there. Dark memories were reawakened and there was many a tightening of the stomach and welling up of my eyes  as I read their tragic stories. It was shockingly sad and beautifully done.

I couldn’t leave the gallery that full of distracting emotion, so diverted to a room nearby hung with Elizabethan portraits - a great favourite of mine. The rich darkness of the paint pierced with little blazes of colour and the portrayal of textures is so dramatically beautiful. Pearls, ermine, feathers, velvet, eyes, all glinting their beautiful light. Little did I know it at the time but this was a match being lit which I was to use to ignite some new work using dark bases on which to to overlay brighter colours creating rich contrasts and dramatic mood.

It’s hugely exciting and humbling to be in the close presence of of these paintings but I was nervous too that they could so easily be destroyed by those who prioritise their causes over the concept that everyone can see these paintings close up, completely free and feel the deep charge of human endeavour and recognise the triumph over various of life’s adversaries - financial, health, war. To destroy something representing the largeness and goodness of the striving human spirit, artists triumphing over the big struggles in the world to give us all something which enriches our spirit, doesn’t make sense to me.

Still, those tremendous dark paintings, lit with jewel-like colours, and the power of those works kindled a flame in me sparking my recent paintings.

Small worlds

These paintings emerged as I worked in sketchbooks, trying to get to the heart of what interested me and to access that inner place where the dreams are. I wrote and painted and made little books, immersing myself in the processes without looking for specific outcomes. The contrasts between prevailing deep, dark hues overlaid with little blazes of colour was something I was keen to develop - probably as a result of looking at 16th century paintings in The National Gallery in London. The rich darkness of the paint in these, pierced with little jewel-garnishes of colour and the rendering of textures is so dramatically beautiful: pearls, ermine, feathers, velvet, eyes, all glinting their beautiful light.

The pages of the books I made represented small, sequestered, private universes where the mood was saturated with peace and transcendence - ordinary places affording extraordinary moments. To me they felt like little sanctuaries and moments out of time. The paintings I later worked on zoomed in on moments of stillness, joy and quiet exuberance, recording little passages of ephemerality and turning them into tiny celebrations of things we can find in the everyday - if we look for them.

Exotic plant hunting

Hardy’s Exotic Plants

To travel across unknown seas in search of exotic plants required daring and a passion for horticulture. T.L. Mogford’s wonderful novel ‘The Plant Hunter’ brilliantly describes the fear, moral quibbles and excitement of travelling through China in search of the illusive icicle tree. He gives a great insight into the risks and sometimes craziness involved in acquiring exotic seedlings and his descriptions of the specially made cases and cabinets for housing them are particularly beguiling.

Every year when we travel a mere few hours to visit Cornwall we visit Hardy’s Exotic Plants, each time promising ourselves that we won’t buy any more plants and each time we come away with pots filled with treasures which have tantalised us beyond our determination. It’s a gem of a place all looking quite ramshacklely gorgeous, one plant spilling into another, little seedlings nestled around the base of quite a different species meaning that sometimes when we get home we realise a little plant which we hadn’t noticed has piggy-backed along in the soil of something else. Some things are labelled, some not; some for sale, some not. Plants soar and tumble and burgeon creating a whole experience of being immersed in an exuberance of lushness, marvel and exotica. It really is not a place to be sensible and come away with nothing, so again this year we will make our promise of restraint and again I hope we break it.

The Plant Hunter Returns

Light in the darkness

Lights in night-time windows, little boats their lights shimmering on water, street lamps funnelling pools of light on to pavements, are deep-in-the-heart universal images evoking safety, security and comfort.

Absorbing myself in laying down colours in acrylics on heavy cartridge paper, then slightly sanding the paper - sometimes to reveal the white paper underneath and sometimes to just make light scratch marks - it was like pulling a bucket from a well and over time I dredged up ideas and as Seamus Heaney wrote, ‘set the darkness echoing’.

I had no particular aim in mind except to enjoy the process but I wanted to keep the overall feel dark, just adding tiny slivers of rich colour with chalk and oil pastels. Working on a few of these at the same time, I began to see them metaphorically as images of comfort and peace in dark times, so I called the series ‘Light in the Darkness’.

My First Sale

Anenomes (40x60 cms)- my first sale

The first piece of work I sold - in 2011 - was very unexpected. I had exhibited it very reluctantly at an end-of-year show at Seawhite’s Studio in Sussex. The large piece of paper was unframed, unmounted and very grubby. Futhermore, I’d done the charcoal drawing of anemones (seen right) with my foot, as I’d had tennis elbow.

I phoned the buyer to arrange delivery and she asked me to bring it to her so that I could see where she was going to hang it. On the phone she sounded quite intimidating but I was intrigued to meet her. As she opened the door to her characterful cottage, I immediately realised that she was a collector. Every wall was covered in pictures. I recognised a Gwen John and in other rooms, Alexander Calder and John Bellamy. Even the bathroom had beautiful pictures. She was an older lady who had remained single, had no children and had run her own very successful business. 

She showed me where she was going to hang my work – on the wall up the side of the narrow stairs - and said she hoped I didn’t mind it going there. It was going to hang beside a freekin’ Elizabeth Frink. Mind? My mind was blown! When she went to pay me, she said she wanted to talk to me about the price. I balked. I had wanted to give it to her as it was so badly presented (even though I'd taken an eraser to the grubby marks).I couldn’t believe anyone would want to buy it, but my son had suggested I ask for £50 as she would value it more. At the mention of price, she looked at me sternly. Then she gave me a little lecture about pricing work and the value of original art. I wish I could have taped her. She gave me £100. My first sale.

As we spoke that afternoon - me still slightly intimidated and she a sort of lovely bossy boots - lots of lessons were learnt. She later emailed to say if I ever had an exhibition she would lend me the piece of work she had bought. I rolled my eyes at the idea of having an exhibition as I was working flat-out, full-time, teaching English in a boarding school so there was little or no time to be creative.  Nevertheless the coalescence of the arrival of her email and of hearing the news that another very good friend - who was also in teaching - was terminally ill, had an impact and made me decide to retire at the end of the next academic year. 

Just before I did, I did some drawings in sketchbooks - seen below. They were drawings of what was on my table, made at the end of busy working days. I was lucky enough to be asked to show them in an Open House in Brighton - my first time exhibiting.

Breakfast

Cold peaches at breakfast

I emailed my inspiring buyer to ask her to come to the Private View. She didn’t reply. I later discovered that she had died.  I was so sad that she never knew that the little bit of time that our paths had crossed had had such a big influence on me. Another lesson learnt.

Words and titles

Beautiful words are like little gems glinting in our imaginations. When I'm reading, I jot down in a notebook, words or phrases which particularly glow from the page, and I now have filled a few of these little books. They are usually Moleskines and I like to cover them with different papers.

I write with the finest of nibs in black, brown, orange, purple or pink ink, but never blue - I'm not sure why this is. Maybe I've seen too much blue ink when marking essays when I was teaching English. I turn my notebook to orientate the quotations in different ways on the page so that at a later date when I read them, I have to turn the book round in my hands and each quotation gets my individual attention. Sometimes I add an illustration or doodle. There are often dried flower heads nestled between the pages.

Reading back over the words at a later date is heart-lifting and can inspire the titles of my paintings. Some of these titles are in the image below. I mull over words which appeal to me and arrange and rearrange them on a page - always handwritten - and eventually they fall into a pattern I like, much like mixing paint and colours till they feel right. I particularly like words about landscape and weather, favouring the images associated with winter weather. I also like words to do with home.

Writing these titles takes time but I revel in creating them and enjoy the process as much as I enjoy creating the paintings. Words, to me are like tiny paintings which stir my emotions and delve deep inside me, resonating with fluid memories of place and experience.

I really like the words below, written by George Eliot in 'Middlemarch' about having 'keen vision' and heightened senses. Imagine if it could be as good as that - hearing the grass grow! How magical. The magic of looking and listening to that 'roar on the other side of silence.' Chosing words with care is an attempt to go a little way towards the other side of silence.

making drawings

A section of the collaged drawing on the second piece of paper 

These works started out in Seawhite’s Studio in West Sussex, on a very large piece of Fabriano paper - about 10 feet by 6 feet – which was attached vertically to a wall. I made marks, limiting myself to using beautifully sharpened pencils, really concentrating on the feel of the pencil on the paper and the nature of the marks I was making. It was a deliberately slow, thoughtful process. After several days the paper was covered and I then tore it carefully into pieces and collaged these on to a new, large piece of paper.

I had no preconceived ideas when I started my mark making (apart from to use only pencils), working intuitively, and it was only towards the end of covering the first piece of paper that I started to think about woodlands, wildernesses, the awakening of primeval landscapes, and the seethe of life that exists in these places. As I collaged the torn pieces, images started to emerge and I followed the lines and shapes of the marks to lead me towards more recognisable images, which I then layered with oil bars, very aged newspapers and even lichen. In the final stage, after tearing the second piece of large paper in a deliberate way, I made a series of individual pieces of work.

What to put in the spaces between the trees, on the second large piece of paper, became a preoccupation as I thought about the moving air and what floated and drifted in it: particles of leaf and bark, teeny bits of feather, a fraction of a leaf skeleton, the tiniest shavings of stone, weeny shards of snail shell, snips of leaf veins, desiccated petals, empty seed husks light as a ladybird’s wing – a flummery of teeny, weeny pieces floating, whirling, pirouetting, drifting ascending, swept across warm air speckled with pinheads of pollen. A curdle of little histories, end notes of seasons, faded papery swansongs. Just as in the wilderness, ideas floated and pirouetted in my mind, tumbling, drifting, settling on the page.

Big drawing with some spaces filled in

How my little landscape paintings came into being

These little paintings emerged after drawing for 20 minutes a day in a sketchbook to see what would emerge from my sub-conscious – an exercise encouraged by Andrez Jackowski. He advocates this as a way ‘to access the unconscious’ and ‘to tap into patterns of underlying thinking.’ He assured those of us in his class that ‘images would be waiting’ – and he was right. After a few sessions of just fiddling around, I found myself using oil bars to juxtapose and layer colour, eventually recognising that the colours were those of the landscape where I grew up in Northern Ireland looking out to the Sperrin mountains – teals, mosses, burnt sepias, slates, mauves.

These initial sketchbook experiments grew to encompass memories of the millhouse where I grew up. At first I didn’t realise what the little white houses with no doors which crept in to my work were, but they were compelling. It was after I had done several of these and instinctively could not put a door into the houses (when I put them in, they immediately felt wrong and I had to remove them), that I realised that they represented the house were I had grown up and which was still in the family, but empty, as my father who had lived there for 54 years had recently died.

These paintings became repositories for  a tangle of memories of my childhood in Northern Ireland. From my sub-conscious I dragged into being the smell of frost under star-spangled, dark inky skies, damp grasses, spongy mosses, and the noise of mating frogs from the lint-hole next to our mill house, where flax had been grown to be made into linen. I was further inspired when reading the poetry of Seamus Heaney who lived locally and whose words never fail to plumb deep into the well of my sub-conscious. He recommended that you should ‘trust the feel of what rubbed treasure your hands have known’ and that is what I have tried to do here.