Helen Davison Bradley

2020 update #1

Helen — Sun, 21 Jun 2020 00:52:02 +0000

I have been neglecting my website terribly this year. I have no excuses for this other than being busy and focussed on making new work. Although things have been very far from normal across the globe for the last few months, the Covid-19 crisis has not hugely affected my everyday life. I work from home, by myself, and so it’s mostly been a more intense version of that for me. With a lovely online community of artists for company I have actually been very productive and consider myself incredibly lucky to have the refuge of art to take me out of myself and act as a form of meditation.

There have also been several projects and initiatives which have provided inspiration and a framework to aid continued motivation. These include Tom Croft’s wonderful portraits for NHS heroes, for which I painted three portraits. Here’s the first (below), and my personal favourite.

“PPE”, oil on paper, 12″ x 16″ NFS

Another brilliant initiative has been the Artist Support Pledge founded by Matthew Burrows, which has enabled me to not only sell work, but also buy from artists that I have greatly admired for a long time as well as those I have newly discovered. I was onboard with this movement fairly early on, and it has now become a global force and newly formed not for profit company in support of artists and makers. Instagram has been my main shopwindow for this, but I’m hoping to develop a simple online shop here too where there’ll be work available that is part of the pledge, as well as other work that is discounted while the fall-out from this pandemic continues. I also want to make my own contribution to collective efforts to help those less fortunate than I am with a percentage of sales going to charity. I am currently considering a range of causes that are specifically to do with the struggling arts sector, as well as those that are unrelated to art but close to my heart.

There has been a lot of generosity from across the artistic community. Whether that comes in the form of charitable contributions, the pledge to buy and sell in order to keep a micro economy moving, or the giving of time and resources to simply share knowledge and solidarity. For me, the people I want to give special mentions to are Raw Umber Studios for their free portrait sessions and educational videos going out on YouTube. Coincidentally I did a 4 day workshop at their studio in Stroud just before lockdown with the incredible Felicia Forte. I have been a fan of hers for a long time and can’t believe that the opportunity to study with her so locally presented itself (she is based in Detroit and added Stroud to her international teaching schedule). I love her aesthetic and it was great to experience another way of working and artistic philosophy. For the the first ten weeks of lockdown she instigated a weekly painting challenge which was great to take part in and, again, feel part of a wider community of likeminded people. It was a real sanity saver. Here’s one of my more unusual subjects for the challenge of “chicken”.

“Frozen”, oil on mounted paper, 12″ x 9″

And finally, a mention of cancelled exhibitions. In a year which started really successfully for me, it’s been a great shame to have had several exhibiting opportunities cancelled. I was thrilled to have a painting accepted to the annual exhibition of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, and two paintings selected for this year’s Royal Society of Portrait Painters exhibition. Both of these exhibitions are currently viewable online, and there’s a slim possibility that they may yet take place later in the year depending on the lifting of restrictions. I also had nine paintings due to be on show at The Gallery Holt in Norfolk. Lockdown was announced the week of opening. Still, we’re all in this together and I have so much sympathy for the artists I have seen with cancelled solo shows that they have been working towards for a long time and with much personal expense.

Here is a little bit about my portrait submissions to the RP. I was especially thrilled to get these selected because, honestly, they were a nightmare to paint.

“January Blues”, 50cm x 40cm, oil on gessoed panel .

“January Blues” is a portrait of my husband and was completed at the beginning of the year. It originally started out as a summer painting, with the initial block-in taking place in the heatwave of 2018 in a friend’s studio. The focus was going to be on his new patterned shirt, but life got in the way and the painting was put aside and forgotten. During a tidy up I re-found it and decided to rework it at home. I don’t usually paint with oils inside our house due to the mess and fumes, but I knew that staying in the studio wouldn’t help with my aim of getting beyond the figure alone. Changing location ended up being a real struggle. The light was terrible so I decided to work at night with a controllable artificial light. This was too cold in temperature and I found keying hue and tone really difficult. At the same time our gas boiler broke down and getting it fixed proved very frustrating, with my husband getting a stinking cold on top. He sat uncomplainingly most evenings for the two or three weeks the painting took to complete, wanting to help me, but also wishing he was in front of the fire and that Spring would hurry up and get here. Early on I noticed that a taxidermy crow sitting on the windowsill behind him could become a subtle motif for the general mood that descends in those post Christmas, dark days of January. The result is a portrait that marks a quiet shift into describing something beyond the sitter.

“Blue Glove”, 20cm x 30cm, oil on mounted paper.

The second painting, “Blue Glove”, was made at the same time and is a self-portrait made in the same space, but from a different angle. As I was painting my husband at night, I decided to put a mirror against the wall and use myself as a free model in the day. Again my aim was to work more with the interior, featuring the dresser behind me that houses our collection of various ceramics, plants, paintings (including “January Blues as it dried) and various odds and ends. The light source is a large south-facing window unfortunately, which means the light moves around very quickly. At a certain point in the day however the light hits the dresser and creates some lovely shadows and geometric lines that is fleetingly really uplifting.

The technical difficulties of working in this space of ever changing and unreliable light made both of these paintings a real struggle to complete. They are exercises in perseverance and testament to not giving up.

Gouache Project, page one

Helen — Tue, 10 Dec 2019 23:29:52 +0000

I have really neglected my website this year, and have quite a sizeable backlog of work to post. I’ve been so focussed on painting that I struggle to find time for anything else. In many ways that’s a good thing, I’m energised by my work and am constantly pushing my skillset to experiment and learn. I acknowledge now though that I need to work smarter. I tend to stick with paintings that aren’t working because I can’t let go of a challenge, so I waste time on non-starters when I should move on. Each failure has a lesson in it, but I do need to be more efficient in order to build my portfolio and get more work exhibition ready.

One project that I have been picking up and putting down in between oil and landscape painting is my gouache book project. My aim is to complete what will become a book of some kind that replicates my sketchbook of gouache still life paintings. This is page one. A series of lemons, each sized at approx: 3″ x 5″. I find gouache to be an excellent discipline alongside oil painting and I thoroughly enjoyed working on these.

A First Portrait

Helen — Fri, 06 Sep 2019 12:40:52 +0000

“Nelly”, watercolour and gouache on paper

An indulgent watercolour portrait of my girl.

Watercolour Portrait

Helen — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 00:15:12 +0000

“iPad”, watercolour and gouache on Arches HP paper. 50cm x 30cm

More watercolour work. This is from a few months ago and features the daughter of a friend. Learning through doing.

Detail

Watercolour Sketching

Helen — Mon, 17 Jun 2019 22:19:37 +0000

Daily Sketching

Helen — Sat, 25 May 2019 20:00:51 +0000

I’ve been trying to sketch most days this year (I can’t believe it’s nearly June already). Here’s a selection of my little drawings from January. Since then I’ve started several different sketchbooks for watercolour, gouache and oil paint. Experimentation with style, media and subject is my current focus, and beyond that I’ll see what evolves. Allowing myself this time to try different things has certainly reawakened my motivation and I feel more inspired than I have for a while.

Cosmos

Helen — Wed, 13 Mar 2019 12:29:41 +0000

‘Cosmos’. Oil on card, 8″ x 6″

I have finally organised my photos and put them onto my computer, so I can hopefully catch up with uploading the bits and pieces that I’ve been experimenting with over the last few months. To get started, here’s a little study of some Cosmos from the garden that I painted last October, just as the flowers were finally going over after prolonged warm weather.

I have been busy with different media since painting this, and so this represents the last time I used oils – pretty much 6 months ago. It’ll be interesting to see how my experiments with other materials will affect my oil painting technique when I next go back to it.

Piccadilly Nocturne

Helen — Thu, 21 Feb 2019 19:49:18 +0000

“Piccadilly Nocturne”, 9″ x 12″, gouache

I’ve been doing lots of sketching and painting since the New Year, so have quite a lot to organise and get online. In the meantime, here’s another gouache practise sketch that I painted a few weeks ago from a sketch and photo of the view up towards Piccadilly, complete with Christmas lights. Since working on this I’m starting to get a better feel for the kind of paper I prefer now, and also a method of putting down paint that is feeling more comfortable. I may revisit this at some point and see what improvements I have made.

Clifton Suspension Bridge

Helen — Thu, 10 Jan 2019 20:54:22 +0000

“Untitled”, 7″ x 10″, gouache

I’m still playing around with gouache painting. It’s both incredibly difficult, but also really energising to be learning something new. To keep things a little more controllable I’m allowing myself some time away from life work and am experimenting with working up studio paintings based on quick on-site sketches and photos.

This actually kills two birds with one stone as I don’t really enjoy working from photos, finding it challenging to keep things loose and dynamic. It’s easy to get pulled into adding too much detail and copying too literally. I think used as one of a plethora of tools however, photography could have a place in my practice and my hope is that it will help me to experiment with different subject matter and creative viewpoints. My one rule is that I use my own photos, not found ones, and that ideally they will back-up quick sketches that may not be great in themselves, but mean that I have spent time really looking at my intended subject, mentally taking in the details and atmosphere that the camera misses. As I go along, gouache sketches that I think work well could form the basis for larger oil paintings. Each iteration moving further from the photo and becoming something new.

Here’s the first of this work. Clifton Suspension Bridge in Bristol. I visited and made a couple of really quick drawings, finishing off with some iPhone pics of the same view. My painting is tighter than I was aiming for, but some of what I’m struggling with at the moment is understanding how the medium behaves. In time, I hope confidence will free things up.

Gouache Portrait

Helen — Sat, 29 Dec 2018 20:59:48 +0000

A really enjoyable little project in gouache, undertaken back in August. I used a limited palette of yellow ochre, venetian red, ivory black, cobalt blue and burnt umber. I’m really pleased with the result. It’s a good likeness and the brushwork isn’t over blended, with each stroke serving a purpose. A couple of progress shots follow: