Newsletter: September 2020
With all the depressing news, one of the most soothing and invigorating things for me to do is get out into the landscape….this month’s favourite trip was out to the remote, rugged and very beautiful Scar House Reservoir. It was properly cold, mountain cold in fact, fascinating too; bearing the traces of stone quarrying to build the dams at Scar House and Angram, traces of the Navvy settlement and the incline and rails to move the stone. This is just the kind of landscape that excites me; I think its the historical and human remnants set against the power and scale of Nature. In any case, I’m hoping that this will prove a good source of material to develop over the next few months!
Remote beauty of Scar House Reservoir
One of the things I’ve been working on this month, is an introduction to the wonderful artist Paul Feiler who is a bit of a hero of mine- you can read my article and much more in Painters TUBES magazine: Abstract edition, which is free to read online.https://tubesmagazine.com/books/wkjb/#p=45
Paul Feiler was born in Germany, but spent most of his life in England and was especially drawn to Cornwall, where he worked alongside many of the St Ives group of artists. He is a fascinating artist to study, with an ongoing evolution and development in his work- how amazing and inspiring still to be producing ground breaking, innovative work into your 90’s! If you don’t know his work, it really is worth exploring.
This hasn’t been a month with lots of studio time, but I have been working on a mini series of paintings which are playing with ideas around the theme of transition and change, especially thinking of being on the brink of Autumn, with its changing colours and colder temperatures
This is the first stage of the second in the series-you can see I’ve blocked in the darks, and started to create some movement and interest with loose brush marks.
In the picture above, I’m working on a 61cm square canvas, abstracting from studies done around Sutton Bank, and the views out across the landscape below. Here you can see, the very early stages, with lots of loose brush marks, creating an energy in the piece, and strong darks blocked in to help settle the composition. One of my lovely artist friends said it looks like a shark when I posted this, and of course he is dead right!!!
In the detail shown above, you can see the beginning of development; adding translucent glazes on top of more opaque base layers. To achieve this the acrylics are ‘let down’ with glazing medium, which gives a really satisfying glaze of colour. You can also see the beginnings of some drawing back into the paint surface.
I hope this image shows the development, it is a slow process, even in acrylics, but you see how the colour depth and mark-making is built up, layer upon layer.
Almost there, you can begin to see the richness of colour I was trying to create….particularly with a sense of Autumn colours spreading across the landscape, almost obscuring the brighter colours of Summer.
* My other exciting news is that I am now represented by Bils and Rye Gallery, and a new body of work will be available from them from this week… If you can get to Harrogate, it is a wonderful gallery, with an exciting range of work including sculpture and ceramics as well as painting, so really well worth a trip. If you can’t get over, do have a look at their website: https://contemporarysculpture.gallery/artist/jo-york
That’s all for this month, until next time take good care,
Jo XX
All text and images copyright Jo York 2020