Annie Taylor Landscape Painter

COMING OUT OF HIBERNATION!

2012-02-03T02:53:00.000-08:00

Oil on canvas 80 x 80

I have been taking a holiday from my blog over the past few months. I needed to re-think where I was going with my painting. Somewhere along the line I had forgotten how to enjoy myself in the studio and so over the past few months I have been putting so called ‘artistic integrity’ on one side and simply having a good time!

One of the first routes back to this feeling of well being has been a journey of the imagination, conjuring up a character out of my childhood - an English West Country farmer going about his daily work on a big red tractor. This farmer has now been joined by some sheep and gradually other members of the ‘village’ where he lives are appearing in my paintings.

Oil on canvas 80 x 80

It’s all a long way from the mountains I was painting last year, a nostalgic trip and to some extent a marriage between my painting and my children’s illustration work. I hope what it has done is to create something that has a touch of humour that will reach out to the child in the viewer at a time when we could all do with a little more in our lives to make us smile.

The perils of painting over the top of finished work

2011-07-10T10:14:00.000-07:00

I have a big exhibition coming up this month here in France. That is, it feels big to me, because I seem to have been preparing for it for weeks. It will be the first time I have had a proper exhibition of my work here and for that reason I suppose it is somewhat more nerve wracking than usual ! Mind you up until a month ago I had been quite laid back about it. Of course, I thought, I had loads of work ready….but needless to say when it came to looking at it again, it wasn’t that simple !

Part of the challenge this time is exhibiting with two other ‘Brits’ who are really very good, begging the question : is my work going to stand up beside theirs ? And so when I got down to getting the work out to see what I was going to exhibit, my heart sank and I was into some knock out rounds once again with my obnoxious internal critic who was naturally having a field day making unhelpful comments like : « huh, call yourself an artist ! Who’s going to look twice at this lot ! etc »

That’s when things could have got a bit tricky, as I decided that I didn’t have nearly enough work I was remotely happy with and didn’t have time to produce anything new - so it boiled down to that old chestnut : « What can I alter ?» Well, that can be fatal, but many’s the artist who has fallen prey to that particular vice. And no, it doesn’t always work, in fact quite often it is the exact opposite, particularly, if you keep a photographic record of your work and looking back realise that what you had before was actually inifinitely better.

To give you an idea of some of the dramatic changes that have been taking place, the image at the top of this page used to look like this:

and here's another one that moved from hot to cold:

But perhaps even more extreme, this image from a blog I wrote in March has transformed into something quite different and still niggles me!

New pastures to refresh the imagination

2011-05-14T09:53:00.000-07:00

We just returned from a wonderful road trip down into the very deep south of Spain as far as Cordoba. Starting out from our home in France, we travelled along the south side of the Pyrenees, almost to Cantabria, along stunning mountain roads. We saw huge Eagles soaring above us and then, as we headed down onto the plains, found storks sitting in their huge, ungainly nests that are perched precariously on top of church towers and electric pylons.

We were travelling in the footsteps of the Moors and the early Sephardic Jewish community, staying in wonderful medieval castles and wandering the streets of old towns like Siguenza, Cuenca and Toledo. But what left its mark on me more than anything else was the incredibly diverse and majestic countryside we passed through. From the brilliant colours of La Mancha where the earth is a deep terracotta red contrasting with the vivid green of the spring wheat fields that takes your breath away, to hundreds of acres of regimented olive trees covering every spare inch of land in the countryside of Andalucia just to the South of Cordoba.

When we came back I started to draw some very simple little ink impressions that this wonderful trip had imprinted on my memory and from those drawings I have produced a few small canvasses, which condense some of those memories. Semi abstract and completely different from the large-scale mountain paintings I have been doing since Christmas, these pieces have given me enormous pleasure.

For me experimenting like this is absolutely vital for refreshing my creative energy.

Arriving back where I started

2011-04-08T00:43:00.000-07:00

‘We shall not cease from exploration/ and the end of all our exploring/ will be to arrive where we started / and know the place for the first time.'

T.S. Eliott Four Quartets

'Seeing the Light' - oil on canvas 90 x 90 (cms) combination of the two styles

So, as you know if you read the last blog, I spent January and February shut away in the studio determined to change the way I paint. Persuaded by my bossy internal critic that a ‘looser style’ of painting would somehow make my work more ‘valid’, I set out to produce a series of paintings looking at how light affects the mountains. At the same time I challenged myself to work purely from memory of what I see around me here in the mountains.

The work took a long time and went through numerous changes in pursuit of these goals. I really was not enjoying myself: “so much the better,” said the critic, “art should be a struggle!”.

After 8 weeks, I had completed two paintings. I stood back and looked at them. I felt absolutely nothing. No sense of completion, satisfaction, mission accomplished, simply the reverse. I did not like this work. It simply wasn’t ‘me’.

I was very bad tempered for several days! What a failure, what a hopeless, mediocre painter I was! Then, trawling the internet, I came across the work of Polly Townsend, mountain explorer and artist. Here was somebody’s work that spoke to me straight away. Wonderful paintings, full of energy, form, strength, individuality – this was work that I related to, that really inspired me. Polly’s work has elements of what really fascinates me – the patterns and contours in a landscape.

And so here I am back where I started. I have left one of my ‘misty mountain’ paintings to remind me not to travel too far away from my own style again, but to stay true to the journey I am on, to keep on working at it and see what materializes as time goes by. The change was too extreme, it was stressful and far too un-familiar. Whilst the creative journey is often scary and difficult, I am convinced that it should at least give you a sense of excitement, and hopefully, from time to time a sense of achievement.

The Challenge of Change

2011-03-03T07:38:00.000-08:00

Psychotherapists and gurus of all persuasions regularly focus on our reluctance to change, even though we claim that we want our lives to be different: happier, better, more fulfilling. Something isn’t working, change it and you’ll feel better. Sounds easy doesn’t it?

For most of us working as full time artists, I think the challenge of change is fundamental to our development. It seems to me that the constant search for new ways to express ourselves is what makes the journey so exciting, but at the same time, just as changing the pattern of an unsatisfactory life is scary, so too is taking a leap into the unknown in the realms of creativity.

When I started painting full time 6 years ago, I seemed to find a style and voice very quickly, using vibrant colour and focussing on pattern whether in landscape or still life. The work went well, I felt some satisfaction in what I was producing and quite quickly found that I was selling my paintings whenever I exhibited. Then gradually, the initial interpretation changed, I became more focussed on the quality of the application of the paint and less on creating pretty pictures.

Recently – as you have seen from my previous blog I put all the work of the last 6 years together in a book. It seemed to me when I had done it, that somehow I was making a statement: ‘this is the end of an era. It is where I am now but not where I want to be in the future’

At the same time I warned my followers on facebook that I was going to delete the page. I wanted to give myself sufficient time to experiment without pressure to show off my work. I decided I would not exhibit this year I just wanted to paint. But while change is happening, the world doesn’t stand still and in the ‘sods law’ way of things, no sooner had I set out on this course than I had several invitations to exhibit this year and the facebook page … well, maybe I’ll re-consider!

But in the meantime, I have been working in a very different way, even though that has resulted in chasing paint around the canvas for the past two months. Journeying but never quite arriving! I have been working from images in my head rather than from drawings or photographs. I am relying on memories of how the light looks as the dawn comes up on the mountains; trying to keep the brush work loose and focussed without tightening up; restricting the colours on my palette. At times this is proving a painful experience as the effect I am trying to achieve continues to elude me, but through pursuing this very different approach to my work I hope I will discover something with substance to move me on.

Re-published my Book

2011-02-04T13:04:00.000-08:00

Following my last post, I have just found that I could re-publish my book with over double the number of pages for the same price. The preview below shows the first 23 pages:

Patterns in a Landscape by Annie Taylor | Make Your Own Book

A New Year in the Studio and Marking a Period of work

2011-01-21T02:18:00.000-08:00

Patterns in a Landscape by Annie Taylor | Make Your Own Book

I have put a book together to mark a four year period of work that started in 2006. In a way I rather hope it will act as a milestone - the end of one phase and the beginning of another. I have been feeling a need to change, to say more in my work and with the start of the new year, it is on my 'bucket list'! (Ref: a great film starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman).

In other words, until now I have found it hard to focus on what it is that I want my paintings to 'say' about landscape. Yesterday I was walking with a painter friend high up on a ridge in the mountains near my home surrounded by staggering views in every direction. We kept stopping just to breathe in the air, to marvel at the vast landscape of rock under the brilliant blue Mediterranean sky and to listen to the silence that is so special in this part of the world. We had been talking about what my friend was searching for in her work and it was at that moment that I knew what I had to focus on in mine.

I suppose that subconsciously an artist's voice is already expressing something about their feelings when they paint, however what I am looking for is a way to communicate to others a profound love of the natural world that I have had since childhood. It feels particularly important today in light of so many environmental challenges that we are all facing, that I make some small contribution by sharing that sense of wonder, peace, stillness or simply sheer joy of being alive that comes from being somewhere wild and beautiful.

I know I haven't captured those elements to my own satisfaction in my work so far, so this year I'm going for it - I'll share the journey with you as I go along.

Bonfire of the vanities: destroying sub standard work

2010-12-23T02:25:00.000-08:00

Home Thoughts from Abroad

oil on canvas 100 x 100

I know an artist who resolutely burns much of her old work. When I first started out I was very shocked when she told me this, particularly as the pieces she was destroying seemed beautiful to me at that time. Now I understand her actions only too well.

Recently I visited an old friend who was among the first to buy my work and there was the painting she had bought hanging on the dining room wall. I cringed - had I really thought that piece was sufficiently good to exhibit and with a relatively high price tag ? The fact that my friend loves her painting is irrelevant, my pride is at stake ! I can see everything that was wrong with it now and know that my work has improved considerably since those early days.

Most of us who paint are our own harshest critics, never truly satisfied with what we have produced and spurred on by the idea that one day we will paint something ‘really good’! The trouble is, that producing a piece of work can take days and sometimes weeks for really very little financial reward in view of the hours put in to its creation, so the temptation is to sell those pieces that don’t work at a knock down price in order to have more pennies to put into the materials fund. But at the end of the day when you come face to face with a piece of sub standard work that you created do you really want your name on that for others to see when you know you can produce something so much better?

I suspect this feeling would apply to several of the great painters in art history. Leafing through those coffee table books of images I have certainly come across work by the 'greats' of the art world that I know is simply in print because they produced it, but let’s face it, they too were human even if they are considered the gods of the art world – surely they must have had their bad days just like the rest of us?

Unfortunately, the more I paint, the more critical I become, so these days I do have quite a reject pile, but come what may I have decided to start 2011 off with a new tradition. I am going to destroy my less than good work on the first day of January and take it to the tip for recycling!

Happy Holidays to you all and my thanks for reading these blogs and for your patience as they only emerge when I have something I really feel strongly about.

Deadline - a great cure for procrastination!

2010-11-10T00:21:00.000-08:00

Getting back to work when I have been away from the studio for several weeks is a challenge. I seem to forget how to apply the paint while I have been away and spend hours and sometimes days procrastinating before I actually get down to some serious work. But when I came back from a recent trip I had to focus instantly as I had a deadline to meet for a gallery I want to work with and a very short turn around to produce some new work for them and for my own Christmas show.

Whilst I have a stock of work that could have been used, I needed something fresh and in a smaller format than usual. I prepared 3 small canvasses – 40 x 40 and decided to rework another slightly larger canvas that had lost its way during the summer. The small pieces were relatively straight forward, but it was re-working the larger piece that put me through the hoop.

As I worked at revising it, the painting simply would not come right. Under other circumstances I might have given up, but abandoning it and starting something new was not an option. It’s funny how you just know when something is going to work, returning to each day there is a feeling of anticipation and energy.While you are working on it, you become increasingly absorbed in the continuing journey. It makes painting the sheer joy it can be. But like coins this feeling has its reverse and this particular canvas was no exception.

Every morning I went out to the studio with a heavy heart and sure enough found something else that was wrong with it. A sleepless night followed my dear husband’s comment that he didn’t think I was going to resolve it! What was I going to do? I simply did not have enough work that I felt happy with and the painting I was relying on was defeating me. But I was determined not to give up! So, tense though I had now become, I just kept working until one morning I walked back into the studio and realised that it was almost there.

So what have I concluded from all this about deadlines? Yes, the,luxury of painting for its own sake with no clear exhibition in mind is what a lot of artists crave, but having to paint in order to produce, in order to sell, in order to buy more materials, has provided a tension that can be useful. The painting I am writing about - at the top of this blog - was certainly not one of my best pieces, but it is good enough!

To study or not to study that was the question

2010-09-18T01:27:00.000-07:00

I have been following another interesting discussion on Linkedin. The question posed was: ‘Do you need university to be creative’? This is a subject close to my heart at present as I have been wondering whether to apply for an MFA (Master in Fine Art) course at a university in England.

Actually I found the wording of the question rather confusing, after all creativity is surely inherent in an individual to a greater or lesser degree, although it may be that teaching draws it out or develops what is already there. However in spite of my personal nit-picking on this score, it is a question that has attracted a significant number of responses from the group on Linkedin.

I have never been to art college. Apart from a two year period when I was partner in a painting studio and gallery on Long Island, I originally followed a totally different career path in order to earn a living, only recently taking a leap of faith and starting to work full time as an artist just six years ago. Before doing so I was awarded a grant and had an excellent mentor and I have successfully exhibited and sold my work in respected galleries. As a result of working at it virtually every day, I can see that the work has improved, but I regularly question where I am going with it all and find that I have no real idea how I am going to expand my horizons or bring more depth into what I do. Like many others, the more I work at it the greater my need to search for validity and self-expression.

So my question is not “Do you need university to be creative” but, as a mature student: Do you need university to understand how to grow as an artist? Or: if you have already found your artistic ‘voice’ does life experience do the same job as university? Is it possible to expand those horizons on your own or do you need to learn how to do it? A university course can break down the creativity the artist already has in order to search for something deeper and whilst this would be a very useful process there is always the danger that it could be a destructive one. Each time you create a piece of art you expose a little of your soul and you certainly put your ego on the line so finding a path back from such an experience could be difficult for some.

I have two months to decide before I put in the application and it makes for an interesting debate. There is no doubt that a degree opens more doors and a piece of paper with the words MFA after your name is potentially very useful, but I am not sure that real success in this particular field of endeavour has much to do with academic qualification.

In the meantime I am ‘playing’ in the studio, working on images I draw from my imagination rather than those that I adapt from sketches or photographs….a process far harder than simply re-creating what is in front of me. I'll keep you posted! Oh and by the way, thanks to everyone who joins in with their own thoughts on these blogs of mine. Whilst they are only coming out around once a month, they are often the result of a significant amount of soul searching and thought, so your input is really appreciated.

Right brain painting - turning the image I am working from upside down before I start to paint

2010-08-23T08:50:00.000-07:00

OK, so I can be pretty difficult to live with, I admit it, especially in the summer when my studio becomes a furnace and I spend too long away from my paints. This summer I have had a very long break, but I finally made it back to the studio a couple of weeks ago. It takes a great deal of determination. The dog is in a permanent sulk because her walks are shorter in the morning, the house needs cleaning, the washing isn't getting done, the garden is a mess and someone needs to go shopping – but I have persevered and something is beginning to emerge!

It is still too hot by mid day, which is why I am now catching up with blogging, but I have had time to play with two or three new canvasses using three completely different approaches – one of which - an avenue of beech trees is not behaving itself! When I have complicated images like this to deal with I quite often turn the drawing I am working from upside down. It’s a very effective trick to play on the brain, it stops me getting too bogged down in the detail and makes me concentrate purely on the shapes rather than what they are. Sometimes I fold it in half as well and focus on one half of the canvas at a time. I can be really exciting when the moment comes to turn the canvas up the right way….the bones of the image are there, intact and ready to be worked on and the composition is often much more accurate as a result.

If you are a painter this technique is worth trying if you are not already familiar with it and I have also found it a useful one when a composition is not working for some reason – it can show you where you are going wrong as can a photograph or just simply leaving the piece to stew for a day or two. It is one of the methods taught in an excellent book : « Drawing on the right side of the brain » by Betty Edwards – it’s been around a long time, but I still find it very helpful.

The other two paintings at this time have been experimental with the aim to get back to using big brushes and palette knife – like the two I have included with this piece.

Dealing with the heat and YES, size DOES matter!

2010-07-19T07:09:00.000-07:00

July here in the South of France has been very hot and for much of the time my studio has been impossible to paint in during the heat of the day. Not only has it been way too uncomortable for me, but the paint has also been affected - becoming very sticky and difficult to work with, even when using a medium. Working fast in thin glazes may be the solution. I will need to experiment with the medium to get the consistency right and avoid further stickiness. I am going to try mixing the medium with a little pure turps – just as soon as I can get some – not as easy as it sounds when you live up a mountain !

When it has been too uncomfortable I have abandoned the attempt altogether and spent my time sketching. I’ve been doing quick sketches of people, taking my sketch pad everywhere I go. Last week we took a trip down into Spain and found a restaurant sited just above a beach in a very pretty little cove, ideal for working unobserved - quick pen and ink sketches of all sorts and sizes of people!

But despite the heat and my poor husband's ears battered with my subsequent wingeing I have managed to complete two paintings this month. The one above is fresh off the easel and full of nostalgia for the gentle contours of my native Dorset now I am back in rugged mountain country. It fits the bill for painting smaller, which I vowed I would do following my recent exhibition in the UK. Size DOES matter when you are selling in an environment of quaint country cottages and at a time when people are watching their pennies.

The second painting completed this month doesn’t fit the small is beautiful bill at all (it is 100 x 100). It is another large canvas in the mountain series. I wanted to paint the peak of the mountain opposite the house now that the snow has gone and when we first got back from the UK, there was still a little left just below the summit which was poking up above the clouds. I haven't quite decided what to do about the sky. I wanted a complete contrast to it's companion painting (on the right below) which I completed at the beginning of the year.

Earlier canvas also 100 x 100

Waltzing Around the Easel - or how I perfected the art of procrastination!

2010-06-24T07:09:00.000-07:00

I have been out of the studio for 5 weeks and now I'm back and have begun the oh so slow waltz around the easel, telling myself I will get back to the studio 'tomorrow. It's remarkable, but after a week at home 'tomorrow' has so far not dawned!

You will know if you have been reading my blogs, that I have been exhibiting in Dorset in the UK. It was an open studio event, with around 350 visitors coming to see my work, some to buy, others just to browse, all with lots of questions, many with their own painting stories to tell: all in all it was pretty tiring and I certainly don't envy the gallery owners who have to do it all the time! As a matter of fact I think I deserve a holiday!

Brilliant, there's another excuse to add to the ever growing list! The odd thing is that I do have a lot of ideas that have been incubating while I have been away and I was really looking forward to getting going with them, but that means tackling those big blank canvasses. It is an inescapable fact a lot of artists will agree with, that we are supremely inventive when it comes to perfecting this art of procrastination: the urgent calls to make, the dog to walk, the laundry to do, the TV to dust, the fridge to visit for one last snack....on and on it goes, even after the painting clothes have been put on, the brushes have been put out, and the canvas is on the easel.

Soon of course I will get so disgusted with myself that I will take myself by the scruff of the neck and frog march me back into the studio and close the door! Apart from anything else I need to replenish my stock, having sold well and left several canvasses behind to be 'aired' sometime this summer at Courcoux & Courcoux in Stockbridge, Hampshire.

So I will get back to work and this time with renewed determination to control the urge to paint bigger and bigger. The simple fact of the matter is that not many people have the luxury of large wall spaces to fill and an artist has to make a living. Meanwhile, the image below was a work in progress on the easel when I left - needless to say I can't remember where it was leading me - but it is part of the mountain summit series (which you can see on my website) all of which really just have to be large paintings!

By the way I just finished an interview on another blog which is written by Steve Gray in Australia. One or two of us on there now - follow the link if you have time.

Grrrr ! Someone Copied One of My Paintings Without Permission !

2010-06-05T05:24:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was sitting in my Open Studio exhibition at Dorset Art Weeks just taking stock when a couple walked in to look at my work, clutching a photograph of a prize winning quilt that was based on the painting above! How flattering - you might think and perhaps briefly I did. However a small matter of copyright exists on original artwork and at the very least before you use someone else’s idea even in another medium, you must apply to the artist for permission to use it, which may or may not be granted or for which you may be required to pay a fee.

I think what hit me first when I had digested this information was the fact that the quilt maker had won a prize with it in a big exhibition – a prize for something that had hi-jacked my imagination. Had this person bothered to contact me I might well have given permission provided that the piece was exhibited with full credit to me as originator of the image together with a reference to my web site for further information, but no such approach was ever made.

Obviously with the advent of images on the world wide web, it is more than likely that images will be copied, even if, as I do, you have a copyright notice on each and every page of your site (and blog!). In the Far East there are factories that specialise in copying work and closer to home too, so I suspect that It must be happening to a lot of artists. But those that copy an image should beware, copyright laws exist for the protection of the artist and can be enforced, and as can be seen from my story, you never know when someone will put two and two together when they see a piece of work and tip off the originator of the piece.

If you live in the UK, both Artists Newsletter and DACS (the Design and Artists' Copyright Society) have information on Copyright and in the US I understand a ‘Cease and Desist’ notice can be very effective - if you are reading this in other countries please do leave your contribution to this blog. There have also been a number of interesting discussions on this subject on Linkedin.

Climbing Out of a Creative Abyss

2010-05-20T07:39:00.000-07:00

"Everything I produce is rubbish! I’m useless! Why did I ever think I could call myself an artist! My work isn’t progressing it’s getting worse! I’m thinking of giving it up". I’ve just come off the ‘phone from an artist friend, who is having one of ‘those’ spells. Ouch! The only consolation for these bleak moments is the fact that numerous other creative people have felt this way too. The fact is it just goes with the territory. Numerous books have been written on the subject, and if you ‘Google’ creative blocks you will find acres of helpful advice on how to overcome these bleak periods. The sooner you accept it and work out your strategy for moving on, the sooner it will pass.

So why does it happen? I think it is probably a very good thing that it does. Life always has two sides so why not creativity? Without this experience would we strive for something better? For me that is what the whole process is about – the idea that one day I may paint something seriously good. The fact that I am unlikely ever to feel that I have done is neither here nor there; it is the motivation that is important!

Changing materials, canvas size or shape, looking at a subject from a different perspective, spending time working with another artist, or just going for a long walk with the dog on a beautiful day, can shift the gear. My daughter Beth Nicholas who is just starting out on her career as an artist found that getting all her jumbled thoughts down onto paper before she started work helped to clear her head, then she started writing those thoughts directly onto the canvas where they have now become an important part of her work.

Sometimes after these down periods I think I have made a discovery. I produce what I term a ‘gateway’ painting – something new in my approach which has the potential to open up a new horizon and that will get me motivated again.

There is a canvas ‘graveyard’ in my studio that bears witness to these periods: pieces that I have worked and worked and continue to feel dissatisfied with until I abandon them completely, regretting bitterly the volumes of wasted paint. But they don’t get chucked out, they eventually get re-used and the previous layers form a very helpful basis of texture for something new. Bonnard’s girl on the swing took 10 years to complete – I wonder if there is something else lurking under the paint on that one?

Have you ‘emerged’ as an artist? Now you're over 30, could you be 'over the hill'?

2010-05-13T09:26:00.000-07:00

Recently I started thinking about the term Emerging Artists. I kept asking myself what does this actually mean ? How do you ‘emerge’ ? Is there an age limit - is over 30 ‘over the hill’ ? Do you have to win the Turner Prize ? Presumably Picasso ‘emerged’, I thought, but then what about poor old Van Gogh - did he ‘emerge’ posthumously ? So I Googled the term and found a good blog by Edward Winkelman on the subject, with additional comments about age and the difficulty older artists have to get gallery exposure.

There is a serious gap in the market for the ‘Re-emerging’ Artist or even perhaps the 'Still Emerging' ones. You must understand, I’ve got nothing against young ‘Emergers’, quite the contrary in fact, I am currently rooting for my own ‘emerging’ daughter, but it seems that today it is often really hard for good artists of both sexes over the age of 30 to get their work shown in the key galleries.

I know that since I was finally able to start working as a full time artist I’ve come across a lot of older women painters with huge talent who are not getting the exposure they deserve. I suspect there are also many women artists out there who, like me, had to hang up the apron and put away the paint brush for a good many years while they worked to pay the bills or bring up a family. So how do they get their work acknowledged?

Women artists were rare in the artistic Hall of Fame and it is largely put down to the fact that, with husbands and children to look after, they couldn’t give the time to focus on their art. (IMary Cassatt made it but then she never married and had no children). But the world has changed, for the better in that way, and more or less equal opportunities for women have brought a lot of younger talent into the spotlight in the creative field.

My conclusions on this musing? I think is time for a new art movement for women artists over 30! After all, Grandma Moses (painting above) took up painting when she was seventy- five and painted sixteen hundred paintings by her death at age one hundred and one! A movement that supports and celebrates the work of older women career artists and "re-emergers" and encourages, promotes and explores the opportunities for exhibition both together and individually around the world. My husband rather wittily suggested the name ‘The Old Mistresses’. However, I prefered the title ‘The New Mistresses’ ! Anyone care to join me ?

More Thoughts on Pricing Art

2010-05-05T23:57:00.000-07:00

My previous blog which touched on pricing has elicited one or two comments which have spurred me on to add a post script on the subject. This can be a tricky issue for a lot of artists and for anyone reading this blog who is not a creative, it may be interesting to understand how we arrive at a value for our work.

The first two comments I have had come from two very different artists.

Painter Angela Canada Hopkins has an approach that I haven’t come across before – she prices by the square inch which she says « keeps her consistent ».

Ann Brauer who makes beautiful contemporary quilts believes that « each piece has its price and its owner”.

I price according to my perception of its worth to me to let it go (see previous blog).

Some artists will price according to time spent and cost of materials, but whilst this obviously works from a commercial standpoint, I don’t feel it takes account of the quality of the work.

Then there are those who compare their work with their peers and fix a price accordingly.

It is also true to say that work may need to be priced according to the venue in which it is displayed – price it too low in a good gallery and the work will not sell. I read a good article recently by Eric Rhodes who referred to an extremely successful artist who had failed to sell a piece at a low price and a few years later had shown the same piece at a price many times higher than the original one and sold it straight away!

So what conclusions should we reach? Fundamently, the artist must have faith in their own work – not always an easy one for the creative. (Given the title of this blog, I try to price mine on the days the roller coaster is at the top of the track!).

At the end of the day, for the art buyer I would say – remember the huge amount of work – both physical and emotional that usually goes into creating a piece and in my opinion – don’t try to negotiate. To other artists, if you have used another method of pricing it would be interesting to hear from you here.

Pricing and Getting Ready for a Show

2010-05-03T04:44:00.000-07:00

Every two years I take part in a huge open studio event in Dorset in the UK called Dorset Art Weeks. Around 600 artists exhibit and as you will see if you follow the link to the website, the work is mostly of an extremely high standard. I really enjoy this show and this will be the third time I have taken part. On each of the last two occasions around 300 people have visited my studio and I sold 10 or more canvasses - by and large a much better response rate than showing in a gallery, with the added advantage of being on hand to talk to people about the work and see their reactions at first hand.

So right now I am beginning to prepare the canvasses I have been working on over the winter - painting the edges and wiring the backs. I rarely frame them preferring to leave that up to the buyer. Personally, I really like the contemporary feel of a canvas hung directly on the wall. Occasionally when I do frame I use just a thin wooden strip - about 3 cms - around the edges, usually painted white, which detracts least from the work.

Once all the work is ready, I put a price on it. Probably the hardest part for a lot of artists, but I go by two rules of thumb. My Dorset Mentor, artist Clare Shepherd said to me when I first exhibited with her that you had to work out what you were prepared to part with a piece for. So I look at each individual canvas, think back to the work that went into it, evaluate it from my own critical standpoint and then use Clare's philosophy. So far I think I have only got it wrong once when I allowed someone else's judgement to influence me and sold a piece too low.

Facebook fan pages - a useful marketing tool or the potential for too much influence on an artist's work?

2010-04-08T12:26:00.000-07:00

In these 'anything goes' days of art, when marketing appears to be a vital key to success in an arts career as it is in every other walk of life, I have been wondering what effect the growing use of social media is having on authenticity, development of technique, sincerity, the pursuit of excellence, the artist's 'voice'? Does that sound rather pompous? Am I being very un-cool in even raising this issue?

Like many other artists I am increasingly aware of the importance of self marketing in this vast, highly competitive field, so I am currently pursuing the social media labyrinth. And I have to confess that from my facebook fan page to discussions on Linkedin, I am avidly following the reactions of my 'fans' and the comments of fellow creatives.

Facebook provides a great platform for market research - you can see at a glance which piece of work is achieving a positive reaction and which is not. I have had a page for a couple of months now and I have really enjoyed interacting with my 'fans' and seeing how they are reacting to my work. However at the same time I am aware that it could be a dangerously seductive trap and that it would be very tempting to produce work based on the perceived popularity of each piece that I post.

For me painting for the market would take the joy out of creating and would stifle my work. I confess I now have the luxury of being able to follow my path without worrying too much about whether my work is fashionable or not. Like most artists I am convinced that the next piece I produce will be the 'masterpiece'! This is what drives me to keep creating, experimenting, learning and riding the roller coaster of successes and failures. Hence the two new pieces below. Not the most popular on my facebook page, but they have been infinitely satisfying and challenging for me!

Leaving work to 'breathe' for a while highlights any problems

2010-03-22T07:29:00.000-07:00

When I think I've finished a piece of work it goes up on my studio wall, or sometimes I hang it in the house. This lets the piece breathe for a while and it gives me the opportunity to make sure that it really works. Even pieces that I feel are finished are subject to this 'breathing space' and in some cases I have actually gone back to them some months later.

This is a short blog to show you the transitions that took place on one of the paintings in my Mountains series. The first image is what I had when I first hung the piece on the wall. I quickly felt that it wasn't working and actually left it for about a month. The recent snow on the peak of the mountain I was painting helped to etch it's details more clearly (it is right opposite my studio, but across the other side of a valley). I wasn't after photo realism, I wanted to capture the drama of these mountains in my own way. In the middle picture you can see I had given the peak itself much more detail, but I was floundering for a while with the foreground and in the last picture you can see how I have now resolved it.

The Search for Inspiration

2010-03-12T12:25:00.000-08:00

In between work sessions this week I have been following a heated discussion on the Linkedin website. A member of one of the artists’ groups caused a veritable storm of response when she announced that she was committed to producing a piece of art a day for the next year. One particularly savage comment prompted her to explain more fully the reasoning behind her project and it was part of that reasoning that I found particularly interesting. She says that by forcing herself to create a piece a day, she is not only hoping to improve her work technically, but is also hoping ‘to find inspiration in places I never looked before’.

Like any job a daily routine can become boring. Creating art is no exception. So I will be interested to see the results of this girl's project and whether it delivers all that she hopes. Meanwhile, I'm in no man's land - searching for inspiration for the next piece. Maybe I too should find a way to search in places I haven't looked before. In the meantime the above painting is last week's work.

This was one of those paintings that really ‘painted itself’. It is nearly always the very first layer that I put down that will tell me how a painting is likely to go. Woodland scenes like this one can be difficult if you get bogged down in detail too early, so I used a big brush and half closing my eyes put in the areas of light and shade with quick, loose brush strokes. Working like this I look for shape and pattern that will inform the rest of the piece.

Next I focussed on the tree. It will be evident if you have been following my blog, that I have a bit of a thing for trees ! So this beauty made its presence felt pretty quickly. There are so many different ways to tackle the leafy areas. Having established my shapes of light and shade in my initial work I go back to look for shapes within the shapes : patterns that are created by clusters of leaves between branches. The result is something of a mosaic, or a kaleidoscope of colour which I occasionally exaggerate.

New Work in Progress

2010-03-02T12:31:00.000-08:00

I am working on three tree paintings at the moment, including the one you can see posted in my last blog. I am still resolving elements of all three, but I thought I would post them while they are still in the melting pot as they are part of the same series.

I have painted the big tree before and wanted to approach it again in a slightly simpler way. Initially I thought I would leave it stark against the canvas with no background at all, but that idea has changed and I have had another thought about painting it for a third time, which I may try next.

The restricted palette this year has been very exciting and partly influenced by looking at daughter Beth's work (http://beth-nicholas.blogspot.com) on a regular basis. Take a look and you will see what I mean.

Allowing the Muse to have Fun!

2010-02-27T00:58:00.000-08:00

I was just talking to my daughter, who is also an artist, about the importance of having 'fun' with your work. As children we learn a great deal through play and it is a valuable gift to remember when working full time as a professional creative. In fact many people prefer to remain gifted amateurs rather than to risk losing the joy of creativity because they 'have' to create in order to live.

When I was very stuck last year a friend of mine was talking about her work and said: "I do it because it makes me feel good". That statement helped to get me moving again. I had been agonising so much about the validity of my work that I had completely lost touch with why it was I wanted to be an artist in

the first place - painting was something I loved to do and it gave me pleasure.

But painting is aso a 'fix', a daily necessity which I think has much in common with daily meditation - it is all absorbing and focussing and you can not do without it for very long because one day, just possibly, you might produce something really good! Art is a never ending journey. There are always new places to discover. There are no limits of time or destination on this journey, other than those in your head.

Since Christmas I have given myself permission to really enjoy myself with what I would term nature 'portraits' or 'extracts'. First mountains and now three studies of beech trees, the first of which is above. I will finish the other two this weekend and post them separately. I love these elegant giants that are so much a part of the landscape of my Dorset home. I have often painted them, but this time I decided to paint the portrait of the trees leaving out their surroundings and focussing purely on their individual beauty and character.

I should say that I recently responded to a comment on this blog about realism in art, by saying that photo realism did not appeal to me and yet I suppose these studies have been much more realistic than anything I have done for a long time. The difference, I hope, is the way I have chosen to deal with the subjects - just using the elements of them that have most affected me. Photo realism while it can be very clever technically often leaves me cold. Somehow it lacks soul. It is the soul in nature that is what I am looking to draw out in all my work.

Finding a 'Voice'

2010-02-14T00:56:00.000-08:00

Today it is a beautiful morning in the mountains and a Happy Valentine's day to all. It felt like a morning for a colourful blog - recently they have been about limited palette paintings. The one above is a painting that I originally thought I had finished in December, but I actually re-painted much of it last week. After a while it looked rather insipid. I always hang my work on my studio wall when I think it is finished to guage my own reaction to it. Then it was part of my attempt to pull back on the lush colour I like to use ... but with this one it just didn't feel right. This is one of two views of the Dorset Coast path (see earlier blog for the original), I may try and restrain myself from tinkering with the other one!

I haven't talked about how important it is to find your own 'voice' as an artist. That search for a way to present an image that is uniquely one's own. Here in the mountains that was a poser as the temptation is to paint the gradually washed out layers of mountains disappearing into the distance. After three years I have begun to find some solutions to that as you can see from other blogs.

Interestingly enough I found that painting en 'pleine aire' resulted in my producing a very traditional landscape and as I am not interested in strict photo-realism, I take the sketch I do outside back to the studio in order to bring my imagination into play. This is how I began to find my own particular style, or 'voice'. You can perhaps see what I mean if you look at the more traditional style of painting below that was done completely on location:

The 'Good Enough" painting or knowing when to stop!

2010-02-09T03:47:00.000-08:00

If you paint regularly you will know that the art of 'knowing when to stop' takes a long time to learn. I still find it difficult. I was listening to an artist talking on a programme the other day about the latest Van Gogh exhibition that is on in London at the moment. There is a portrait of a woman that he completed in an hour. In spite of his lack of public recognition during his life time, he obviously knew when he had completed something to his own satisfaction. On those rare occasions when the painting seems to 'paint itself' I think perhaps I should stop there at the end of that first session and not allow that critical person to come along and 'tidy up' my painting a day or so later! I did wonder whether the example below was a case in point. Another mountain peak - I'm still hooked and this is number four. In the first one you can see where I was at the end of the first session and the finished canvas as of this morning.

I'd like to leave this blog with a quote by Picasso from an article I read about him recently. I think it is food for thought - perhaps even something for the vociferous stars of today's art world to ponder! The quote refers back to his previous comments about his huge success and wealth:

"When I am alone with myself, I have not the courage to think of myself as an artist in the great and ancient sense of the term. Titian and Rembrandt were great painters I am only a public entertainer who has understood his times and has exhausted as best he could the imbecility, the vanity, the stupidity of his contemporaries. Mine is a bitter confession, more painful that may appear, but it has the merit of being sincere!"