Honeyed Times’ Series (2021)
Another year another series started! This one is bringing it back to flowers and gardens. Which are always some of my favourite paintings to work on! I love the variety of colours, textures, and differing levels of delicacy that I get to interpret through paint. To me there is nothing more appealing to paint than plants and nature.
From an outsider’s point of view this new series could look like my first series of garden paintings, British Horticulture Series (2019-2020). For me the tone feels different, lighter, more magical, with an air of renewal in them. This new series feels more optimistic and romantic. Like turning over a new leaf, shedding the last of the old ties, and I am just ready to feel joyful. This optimism might be due to the onset of early spring weather or maybe my mood (I think it is both). I do love the air of mystery and dark depth from the last series but I feel like it is time for a change of flavours.
So what is in this new series of watercolours? I am only three and a half paintings deep and am still figuring out the language I want to use. I am deep enough that I know the sense of the energy I want to capture. Essentially I have a rough idea and I just need to start polishing it but I still want to share the journey along the way.
When I start a series it always starts organically perusing the photographs I take for reference. I bookmark my photos and throw them into different digital piles that share a likeness thematically, and more importantly, an essence and sense that they relate in some way. Then after I am done I decide on the file and the photograph that will inspire the next work.
I don’t prolong the planning process. After I settle on the image I start to paint, keeping in mind what I want to evoke and common themes. Acting immediately is usually the best root in my experience. It invigorates the process of painting and brings the series to life - solidifying what I want to capture.
Here are some words/bullet points that I am using as a jumping off point:
Calm
Richness
Diaphanous
Sunny
Happy
Stopping to smell the flowers
Relishing in the happy sunny summer days
Arthurian
Kingdom (On top of the world?)
Canada + English landscapes/gardens
I am reading a lot of books to inspire the work. Again I’ll just list titles because I think that says more than words about my readings at the moment.
Fiction:
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (the first half is all I care about)
Howl’s Moving Castle by Diana Wynne Jones (always one of my favourite books)
Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne
Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery ( a bit of Canadiana is a must!)
Non-Fiction:
Wilding the Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree
Losing Eden - Why Our Minds Need the Wild by Lucy Jones
The Joyful Environmentalist by Isabella Losada
All of the fiction is light and joyful, embellished with images of nature and innocence but the non-fiction is full of thought inducing things that I hope will tease something out of my brain over time.
I have also been looking at impressionist painting and Romanticism (landscape painting Romanticism specifically, not the poetry or writing, or political visual art). I think most artists look to art movements of the past at some point and try to align themselves with the ones they feel akin to, sort of like a personality quiz. For me, I find myself in line with the Romantics and the impressionists. For those not familiar with Romantic painters some notable artists are J.M.W. Turner, Thomas Cole, and John Constable (Romantic landscape paintings were dominated by English painters). Notable artists from the (French) Impressionist movement are Claude Monet, Edgar Dégas, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Just to name a few from both movements.
My understanding of Romanticism is that it as it followed the Age of Enlightenment/ Age of Reason, a time which focused on making rational sense of everything, and landscape paintings valued the picturesque, which stationed nature as subordinate to man. Romanticism rejected this black and white thinking and explored the grandeur of being emotionally overwhelmed with a sense of the sublime felt in relation to landscapes. This took shape in paintings of storms, wild landscapes, and gothic architecture. It is said that our feelings of yearning and longing to be free when we see a sunset painting today comes from the Romantics.
I like these ideas of the romantics and I thank them for our romantic appetites for landscapes and I hope that viewers can feel similar emotions when they look at my paintings even though I think that my work is done a bit more formally.
I also mentioned Impressionism as an art movement I keep in mind as I work on this new body of work. Off the top of my head when I think of Impressionist paintings I think of artists that are loose with their brushstrokes, and painting scenes that feel like slices of life for the average person. Like Degas’ paintings of ballerina’s slouching in ballet classes, or Monet’s paintings of a steamy train station.
Impressionism built onto the preceding Realist movement, which had rejected the Romantics glorification of overwhelming emotions, instead depicting the lives of ordinary people. That was radical because paintings were only for the rich or the church prior to this. The Impressionists focused on rendering the feeling and energy of the moment using loose quick brushwork, often working à la plein-air (allowing viewers eyes to fill the gaps), using bright colours, and dedication to capturing natural lighting, which is complex and multi-faceted.
How my work and the Impressionists work overlaps is the overall brightness, landscape, and the sentiment of capturing a moment. The work differs as my brushwork is more exact, my paintings more than an impression. Less about capturing an impression and more like documenting rapturous moments. I might be delusional in the overlap but I feel that there is.
I’ll leave you here for today having shared the ideas floating in my head about my most recent works. I hope that they feel just as happy to you as they do to me.
Willows and Pooh,
L