'Studio Chatter' - What has inspired your painting practice lately?
I have been inspired by all sorts and to be honest I always am. My art practice is fuelled by what is going on around me in my life. Ideas spark and I record them by taking photos or making notes in my sketchbook with whatever I have to hand.
Here goes a little list of what has inspired me over the last couple of months:
beautiful sunsets
birds and movement
fluffy cloud forms
reflections in water
sunny walks in the countryside
the texture of oil paints
Whilst I have lots to inspire me, the time I have to paint at the moment isn't as much so many of these ideas will remain in my inspiration bank until I can explore them further.
Over the last few months I have managed to try out oil painting. I mainly work with acrylics, watercolour and collage but I wanted to explore the luscious texture of oils, so here are the results so far! These two little canvases are inspired by collages that I made which were inspired by the local landscape. I enjoyed smooching the paint around the canvas and laying it on thick. After a couple of weeks drying in my kitchen I am pondering on my next moves or not!
The landscape is bursting with inspiration too at the moment. I am loving all the textures, bright pops of colour, strange shaped trees and lots of fluffy clouds.
The painting below is inspired by the windswept tree in the photograph above.
I have also been out to draw, with a focus on birds and animals. I am itching to paint some birds and animals large scale. This is a painting I made last year which i enjoyed and is a starting point for a new collection.
A few weeks ago made a trip to Paradise Park in Hayle to see the birds and make some sketches. I took all my supplies; paints, sketchbooks, pens, coloured pencils but found that actually just a black pen and sketchbook was all I needed to create very quick sketches of the birds and animals alongside taking lots of photos.
There is so much eye candy here to inspire. Above are a few of my favourites. What I soon realised was that you had to be super speedy to capture many of the birds and animals here, so I went for very quick studies.
From the notes that I have made I will be looking at creating compositions for my birds, I have had a quick play on the ipad with some ideas but would like to paint these onto large canvases. So before that happens I probably need to paint out some ideas onto large paper and see where it takes me.
I would love to hear about what is inspiring you right now, leave a comment or drop me a line if you fancy. To finish off I'll leave you with some sunset inspiration from Gwithian, Cornwall.
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