For me, September has been all about the skies! We’ve had amazing sunrises and sunsets, incredible cloud formations and beautiful light. I remember reading about how influential Luke Howard’s Climate of London was on painters like Constable…he began to categorise clouds into types like Stratus, Cumulus and Nimbus, even the names have always fascinated me. The illustration below comes from his paper, On the Modification of Clouds, of 1802, and shows simplified cloud shapes and structures.

(If you fancy reading a bit more, there is a Science Museum Blog about Luke Howard: https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/the-man-who-named-the-clouds/

At the beginning of the month, I had the excitement of dropping my work off for Great North Art Show, and was just looking forward to the Preview Evening, when everything changed…To cut a very long story short, I ended up unexpectedly helping with the hang, and then everything went a bit pear shaped because of the very sad death of the Queen. The venue being a Cathedral, went into official mourning so we couldn’t really complete the process of hanging a very large exhibition in a massive space. It really was a bit of a nightmare, but eventually after a huge amount of work and very achey and bruised arms and legs(some of these paintings are seriously heavy!!), a small team of us managed to get the show together. Completely understandably the show couldn’t start as planned and the Preview had to be rescheduled too.

There is a bit of a dark art to picture hanging…for Great North Art the exhibition designer needed to hang the work quite closely, and we used lengths of wood in different thicknesses to decide on the gaps between paintings and to check they line up. She is still very much on Imperial measurements so they were 4 inches/ 3inches/ 2 inches and 1 inch thick in 3ft lengths, and it really is a great system. Once you’ve hung one painting, and made sure it is straight with a long spirit level, you can just choose the right gap and bung in the corresponding piece of wood, push up against it tightly and the next painting can be screwed up, and so on…if you’re not sure what gap will look best it is super quick to try several with the different lengths of wood. You can also bridge across two pieces to check if they are level using a long spirit level-I know I keep mentioning this, but it is a great inexpensive buy from a DIY shed. Incidentally we were using mirror plates for security, and also because you can screw in one side, then check with a spirit level and then do the other.

Anyway, we did have a lovely Preview evening and the show is now open and running every day until the 9th October. If you can get to Ripon in North Yorkshire, it really is worth a visit; the Cathedral makes an absolutely stunning venue and the show looks amazing!

Below: First row-snippets from the hanging process.

Second row-Preview Evening

I’ve done a surprising amount of painting this month…

The trouble is, it’s been more of the painting and decorating kind than the painting on canvas I had hoped for! I suppose there is only so long you can put off doing the decorating, and the house will feel much more like ours when it’s finished. I love this soft green/grey on our wobbly thick barn walls! And meanwhile I’m just trying not to beat myself up too much for the lack of studio time.
I have started work on an idea for an abstracted landscape, which comes from a series of sketchbook paintings I’ve been making over the last month or so…
The paintings are exploring in paint a language for expressing an abstracted landscape…using colour, simplified shapes and mark making without being too specific.

The starting point was this little painted study, which I’ve been developing into a large painting. The process for doing this is not very scientific…I’m not literally scaling up, but playing with the shapes and scale and experimenting with them in a larger format; adding and subtracting areas as needed in an intuitive way.

You could literally use a scaling up technique with a series of grids, but for me this ends up being too much like painting by numbers and it just doesn’t feel right. Instead a looser, more free flowing method seems to work much better.
The first very short video below shows the very beginning of the process; adding key shapes and blocking in darks…

The next stage after blocking in the main shapes and structures, and the darkest areas is to lay down colour across the canvas. A lot of the colours will change, but getting a base colour in and getting rid of the white of the canvas is the important thing here. As I always work in layers, this is just the beginning and many many more variations of colour, and translucent and opaque layers will be added on top. The second little video shows a little of this process…

Hopefully the gallery above gives an idea of the development of a painting adding; darks, basic shapes, basic colours, details, layered colour and texture, glazed areas.

It is an interesting thing that this kind of work feels quite different from my more atmospheric landscape work…It is important for me to have a number of different ideas, approaches, lines of enquiry on the go at once. If one area feels stuck or just not flowing for a while it gives me some other channels that feel fresh and different, that can jump in and take over….all these things are personal to individual artists but I’ve got many of my coaching clients to try it over the years, and it seems to work for many of them as well as for me! This abstracted landscape then, fits into one of my lines of enquiry, which is more geometric, and abstracted but still expressive.

I think the painting above is just about done, but as usual I’ll probably keep it propped up in the studio or even in the house for a while, just to be sure.

Still working on the right title, which by the way, is a very tricky thing!

Well, I think that is just about all from me until next month. If you think of something you would like me to talk about do let me know!

Meanwhile, take care and keep in touch,

Jo xx

Newsletter: September 22

Newsletter: October 22

Newsletter: August 22