Most of your artwork uses pastels and oils. Can you talk about why you mainly use these materials?
I enjoy using charcoal and soft pastels rather than pencils and pens. It is hard to describe why, I think it has to do with the plane of tone or colour and its smudgy look, rather than sharp line and point. Gravitating towards colour and its expressive possibilities, I find I best respond to layers of smudged soft pastel to stimulate my imagination. After fixing the pastel, I might use gouache or oil paint to bring decision and definition in clarifying a theme or subject.
As for paint, I often like the heavy oily density of oil paints and their coverability and textural possibilities. I also thin oil paints with lots of turpentine and use a wispy rigger brush to create linear effects, mimicking the crackly and tatty visual qualities of the landscape. I then work into that with soft pastel and oil paint. I will also use pigmented inks for the same reason—creating linear tension and surface energy. I do also use acrylic paints but more as an underpaint and surface preparation.
I use heavy etching paper—usually Fabriano and Saunders—for their smooth yet toothy cotton surface. This paper can take a good deal of layering and mixed medium process. The softness of the paper needs to invite pastel finger smudging. A harder glue sized watercolour paper doesn’t work as well. It’s very much a tactile experience for me.
I also use stretched linen canvases for a few works and then move onto paper, perhaps painting with a more Impressionist eye, and then another time, be more Expressionist with stronger colour and emotion.
I am also enjoying the movement between focused book illustration works and open-ended landscape painting. The former has a strong idea origin while the latter is more of a journey and unfolding dialogue.
I like to vary my approach and intentions so that I don’t end up repeating solutions and becoming bored or predictable. I need to be surprised and engaged with discovery so that the process of creative build up is unpremeditated and fresh as both an experience for me and outcome for the work.
‘Handmade’ is rapidly acquiring a significant definition these days in the light of rapid AI development. My own physical tactile sensation in using my hands has remained with me since art student days, and I need to be able to feel the nature of the substances I use with my hands. They become something of a talisman and add to the physical pleasure of painting and drawing.
The feel of charcoal and pastel as an anchor, the way these materials create a varied line of thickness and intensity makes the process feel more like divination as a result. I like oil paint for its inert heaviness and oily finger smudge. Ink, on the other hand, can easily become linear and move on the canvas, even have a life of its own due to its fluidity.
An artist finds the materials that suit physical, emotional and idea needs. They become friends with whom one can have comfortable, familiar and warm conversations.