I’ve always found that oil is amazing media. Yet before I put brush to board, I always take the time to create preliminary sketches. These are key to the structure of my paintings and they are also the stepping stones for my imagination to skip about on. I never quite know where they will lead me!
When it’s time to use the oil paint I adore how it allows you to mix it on your palette to achieve the tones I have visualised for my art. I paint on board using a palette knife and brushes. Is the traditional way to paint with oils and one that I have always favoured.
When I’m painting a landscape or a seascape I always start with the sky. The sky is always the core focal point for all of my paintings. I don’t restrict my art with any fixed rules. There’s always a gentle flow to my work even in the most dramatic of landscapes.
My curiosity for the ever-changing world in our skies leads the charge. The vast variety of clouds, and the exquisite light creates the foundations for every landscape and seascape I paint.
I let the brushes and my mind work hand in hand and accomplish paintings that embrace the environment laid out before me encapsulating the raw energy that they create.
Using nature as the final piece in the artistry puzzle, the mediums of oil paint on canvas enables me to capture rare moments in time of movement in her landscapes and seascapes.
By working on the basis that what pleases my own eyes I then let my imagination take over.
My subconscious and conscious mind add in the textures and the colours that represent and tell the stories of the day and that particular landscape or seascape.
I blending the oils onto the board so that you can imagine yourself there. The smell of the sun warmed salty mists of the summer seas.
The rush of the autumn winds as they roar down the sides of the mountains or between the headlands.
The gnawing of the icy temperatures of winter in the Highlands.
The ethereal joy of spring time as Mother Nature works with the land and sea to create new possibilities for the year ahead.
It’s creating the story within the painting. Being able to lose yourself in the brush strokes just as those to whom the painting finally resides with will do.
The more you look at the paintings the more you see and the more you understand. Yet by contrast; the more you know the less you know and the more you therefore want to know.
Art is a wonder for the mind. The world is a wonderful place when we take the time to stop. To breathe. And to gaze in wonder at the miracles of the planet we call home.
I paint in my studio; it’s my place of refuge. Where the world goes about its business as the seasons turn. The floor to ceiling windows let the natural daylight flood in even on the darkest of winter days.
If you’d like to see where I paint, click the link and head on over to my blog on My Favourite Place to Paint.