DORSET ART WEEKS 2012

One of the best ways I know to renew your faith in yourself as a  painter is to take part in an open studio event.  As I have mentioned in previous blogs working in isolation so much of the time, you never know whether what you are doing has any validity or not, hence the holding of breath when you put it out there for others to see for the first time. The open studio event makes exhibiting a very personal experience where you get to see for yourself how people react to your work.

Dorset Art Weeks is one of the largest open studio events in the UK.  With around 1000 artists taking part across the county this year it is a lot for people to get around in the 16 days it is on, but people come from all over the UK and spend a lot of time visiting studios right across the county. This was the fourth time I had taken part and once again it has re-invigorated me and given me a lot of food for thought for the new direction my work has taken over the past 6 months.

I have been exhibiting two very different strands of work - the more traditional mountain paintings that have come about as a result of living and working in the Pyrenees and the lighter hearted composites of life in the countryside in Dorset.  It was what reception these Dorset paintings might have that was the unknown factor that was making me a little nervous but I have been very pleased at the response so far.

You can follow news of my work and new exhibitions on facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/annietaylorlandscapepainter

SPRING IS SPRUNG! NEW WORK, NEW WEBSITE & NEW FACEBOOK PAGE!

© Once upon a Landscape 100 x 100

Well yes, Spring has definitely sprung in this corner of France. After several months of hard work in the studio I have celebrated with a lovely new website put together for me by Richard Dron at Alchemie in Prades, which is so easy for me to work that it has revolutionised my web experience (http://annie-taylor.com). Then today I started a brand new page on facebook - and no, I haven't created the link here yet - although if you look for Annie Taylor Landscapes you should find me, and now, last but not least I'm getting back to my blog.

For the last few months I have been preparing for an exhibition in Dorset, England, that runs from May 26th for two weeks. It's a huge open studio event which takes place every other year. The preparation has been quite intense, but it has also been a lot of fun.  "What no agonising artistic angst?" do I hear you cry - no, just paintings that make me smile!  I have been having a lovely time painting stories - hence the title of the one above - Once upon a landscape.  These imaginary landscapes, peopled (or even 'sheeped') are based on slightly nostalgic memories and are quite a contrast after a heavy year or two of absorbing the mountains around us here and finding different ways to interpret them. 

I owe thanks in part to the wonderful David Hockney, who really got me going again after quite a long period of creative doldrums.  A particularly good interview on English television about his recent landscape exhibition The Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy in London renewed my interest in the landscapes of my childhood. The exhibition itself, whilst rather overwhelming perhaps in terms of quantity was, for the most part, a celebration of brilliant colour and a permission to interpret that colour in a way that I have not done for some time.

COMING OUT OF HIBERNATION!

 © All is safely gathered in

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.

© Walking the dog

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.

© Burt's sheep

The perils of painting over the top of finished work

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

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

‘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

© Early one morning 90 x 90 Oil on canvas

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.