Lethe River of Forgetfulness

Being asked by Lesley Williams to write a piece about my art got me doing a bit of deep thinking, how does one actually talk about such a personal subject?. Starting from a very young age I wanted to paint and when I got to school. even primary school I found I had more natural talent than my peers. I managed to keep up this enthusiasm until l left school but then work and life intruded and art got put on the back burner, although I still had paint and brushes in the house.

Prayer Flags

After our children had left home I had a bit more time to spare and the paint and brushes came out again, at this time my subjects were landscapes as I had nearly always chosen this to paint but now I tried to make them as different to our flat Norfolk landscape as I could, scenes through the seasons on Swiss farms took up several canvasses scenes from Tibet and the Himalayas with the ubiquitous prayer flags took several more canvasses and also proved popular as I was asked to paint several of these till I decided that was enough, throughout this time our youngest daughter Melanie had badgered me to try painting an abstract piece, after some more prodding and a gift of some acrylic paint I took the plunge. But then in 2013 at the age 40 Melanie died, of course this was extremely traumatic for all of us but art wise it meant my course from then on was set.

Beatnik Empire

When I first came across WNAA I was a bit reluctant to join as I was sure my type of artwork would be looked down on! How wrong could I be? Of course I was made welcome and accepted from the start and although I did feel feel at first that I was plowing a lonely furrow with my abstracts { from memory I can only recall Andrew Schumann who was doing abstract work at that time and his could not be more different from mine} but then David Lendrum joined and he was a kind of kindred spirit although David’s work always seemed to be generally more bright and optimistic than mine derived as they are from nature rather than my more un thought out approach. However over the last several years more of our members are turning their hand to this type of art Michele Summers and John Lawson especially spring to mind and Esther Boehm with her very individual sculptures that seem to me to embody abstract themes into 3D forms.

No Mans Land

When starting a new piece of work I very rarely have a plan, I usually have a title and a basic colour scheme but then usually, somewhere along the way evolution takes over and the title is the only thing left and sometimes even that gets set aside. I should say here for those of you who don’t know I work in INK! When I was young I used oil paint and was prepared to put up with the drawback of waiting forever for work to dry, I did try acrylic paint but didn’t really take to them I do often put down a base coat of acrylic as a starting point but from then on it is ink mixed with various mediums to help eke out the ink as ink is quite expensive and you don’t get much for your money, the problem is that the various mediums tend to slow down the drying time so in that respect I am no further forward. I feel very fortunate to have a proper studio to work in as working with ink the canvas needs to lay flat and sometimes not be moved for a couple of days.

I suppose I have digressed somewhat by talking about the HOW rather than the WHY, but philosophically my attitude to art can be summed up in this quote by the American author and marketing guru Seth Godin.

Art is what we call the thing an artist does, its not the medium or the oil or the price or whether it hangs on the wall or you eat it. What matters, what makes it ART is the person who made it overcame the resistance ignored the voice of doubt and made something worth making. Something risky. Something human. Art is not in the eye of the beholder it’s in the soul of the artist.