Abstract art: progression and process

Today I wanted to share a little insight about how my paintings progress and develop. I thought I’d show you some abstract paintings I’m currently working on at different stages of un-dress and un-doneness.

ALIGN THE PROCESS WITH THE INTENTION

Every artist has a different process and it’s important that the process you choose to use or develop reflects the things you are interested in. Our processes are a vital part of the mix, they are part of our art decision making, part of how we want our art to feel and be.

There is no one way to paint a painting. I try and ensure that the way I paint a painting emphasises and aligns with my sensibilities and reflects how I want my art to feel…

So for example I love delightful details, layers of complexity, rich maximalist combinations, I want my art to be bright and playful but also have a depth and complexity. I enjoy exuberance AND control. I like a sense of seeking and finding. I enjoy my paintings when they feel like they have a history, like they are interesting objects with a past. I want to celebrate beauty in the mundane. And because I have really thought about all this, I am better able to develop art making processes which give me these results.

TWO QUESTIONS

So in a nutshell it is useful to think “what are my paintings about?” and “how can my processes support and align with this?”

Art inspired by objects

In this post and video I want to talk about how the objects in my life inspire my art.

CONNECTING TO THINGS

I’ve always been super inspired by nature and being outside, trees, organic forms, foliage and flowers. In the last few years though, I have also been fascinated with objects and items in a domestic setting. Art making helps me to connect to myself and the world around me. It is a way to understand who I am and what I am interested in. It is an ongoing conversation with myself which unfurls, develops and evolves.

INSPIRATION IS ALL AROUND

And in recent years a lot of my art has been an exploration of my connection to home and the items that accompany my everyday. The objects and things that I travel through life with. 

Why am I so inspired by the domestic?

I’ve been thinking about my relationship to home and the things in it a lot recently. 

EMOTIONAL CONNECTION

Over the last couple of years we’ve all spent far more time inside our homes, haven’t we?  

When our house flooded and we had to live in hotels for several months, I missed the familiar objects of my day-to-day. The importance of home has perhaps also taken on a different meaning for me since both my parents died. My home now represents a feeling of security and grounded-ness, of roots becoming established. 

My home brings together objects and items that I love, which mean something to me, but also just random things I like and enjoy. I like the fact my home contains a layering of things, some with meaning attached, some picked up in a junk shop just because they are interesting or unique.

I came across this quote from Matisse:

“I have worked all my life before the same objects… The object is an actor. A good actor can have a part in ten different plays; an object can play a role in ten different pictures.” Henri Matisse, 1951

The objects we surround ourselves with play a part in our lives, they are actors on our stage. They may reflect who we are, what we love, our taste, our preferences and our experiences. Our things can be a wonderful source of inspiration for our art making because in some way they are a reflection of us…

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If you’re looking for an art process to help you create beautiful abstract and semi abstract acrylic paintings from objects in your life, you may like to check out my class Objects to Abstracts:

My story

I became an artist a little later in life, in my late thirties. I didn’t go to art collage and gave up studying art when I was just seventeen. My route to becoming a full time artist has been a rather circuitous one. I didn’t create anything at all in my twenties, then spent my thirties obsessed with art, but only ever as a hobby. It wasn’t until my forties that art slowly evolved to become my full time career.

As a child, I was always drawing. I dreamed of being a textile designer. I loved spending hours creating elaborate and intricate patterns from my imagination. I used to get through so much paper that my father started to buy me large rolls of wallpaper lining-paper to keep up with my insatiable demand for something to draw on.

Recent artwork

Recent art work

Drawing from 40 years ago

My Mum was studying contemporary textiles when I was little, so she was always sewing or taking me to the haberdashery. Thread, fabric, colour, pattern were the back-drop to my childhood. I have always been fascinated by pattern and colour

But then at seventeen when a school time-tabling clash wouldn’t allow me to study art with my other subjects, I gave up studying art and I gave up creating art and I allowed it to just slip out of my life.

A little bit of heartbreak brought me back to art making. A relationship breakup when I was 28 or 29 left me moping around with no summer holiday plans. I decided to book myself onto a two week painting summer school at a London art college. It was there that I started a much more fulfilling love affair… I fell completely and utterly in love with drawing and painting.

For nearly all of my thirties art was a hobby, I tried to go to art collage and was rejected after a terrible interview, so I just thought that creating art would remain a life enhancing, life enriching hobby.

In my late thirties as I climbed the career ladder at the charity I had worked at for for nearly a decade, I began to feel that perhaps I had laid my ladder against the wrong wall.

I had a clear epiphany out of the blue one day, that I really did want to make art a more significant part of my life… so I set about trying to make art my career.

I took tiny steps in the right direction. I started to try and sell my art online. I entered competitions and group shows and slowly and surely things started to happen. I won a Winsor & Newton watercolour competition which meant my art was displayed at The Saatchi Gallery in London. Eight of my paintings were displayed at one of Gordon Ramsay’s restaurants… I build my confidence, learnt new skills and made art my part time career and then eventually my full time career.

Recent sketchbook pages

Recent sketchbook pages

I’ve now patch-worked an art career together through trial and error, finding out what works and what I enjoy. I love the career I have built. I license my work for wall art, branding and products. I sell my original paintings and complete commissions for original art projects such as for hospitals. I have written a book about mixed media sketchbooks and I teach online classes.

Art inspirations and fascinations

Creating art is a process of unpacking the things in life which fascinate; a wonderful way to explore obsessions and better understand curiosities. Creativity is a process of discovery and exploration.

By making art, I have discovered more about my self and the world I inhabit.

It has encouraged me to meet myself on the page, to become clearer on what moves me, motivates me, interests me and lights me up.  To follow the threads of my curiosity and weave them together. 

EXTERNAL WORLD

The process of creating art has ignited multiple and diverse love affairs for ancient textiles, seaweed, fossils, found patterns, painted ceramics, trees roots, sacred geometry, weeds, patterned rugs, reflections on water, hand embroidery, folk art, iridescence....

It has connected me to tthe world around me in a tangible life-enriching way. I notice more of what I am curious and fascinated by.

INTERNAL WORLD

It has also prompted me to tune-in to my own sensibilities. Why do I create art in the way that I do? What is my art about? I would say my art is about delightful details, beauty in the mundane, seeking and finding, layers of complexity, reveling in colour, fragments of wonder and awe, exuberance and control, moments of joy, combinations and juxtapositions, threads through time…

I want my art to feel expressive, joyful, combine exuberance with quietness, be bright, playful, interesting, complex.This is also how I want my life to feel, what excites me in my art is what I seek in my life and what I seek in my art is what excites me in life..

Drawing and exploring

In this video I share a little of my art process when creating something new. I like to draw and explore with different materials and approaches, think through doing… gradually unpack an idea. Get stuck in and see where it takes me.

Abstract art and art books

MUSIC CREDIT: If i wrote you a song, by Melanie Bell via Epidemic Sound

In this video I share a little of what I am up to in my art practice at the moment, painting on paper, the art books I’m currently reading and loving and a few recent adventures within my sketchbook…

ART BOOKS:

John Walker, The Blue Series, Messums Art Gallery, Catalogue, published in 2023

David Mankin, Remembering in Paint by Kate Reeve Edwards, published by Samson & Company 2021