Monday, February 24, 2020

Taking an idea through

Stalking Spring, oil on canvas, 50 x 40 cm
Today I think I finished an oil painting. I haven't been painting in oils for months, maybe even a year or more. I love working in oil but getting started with it just seems to be a big commitment. I hate cleaning my brushes, I get paint all over me in a way no other media does and I have to move furniture to set things up to paint at an easel. I work in so many different media and lately it has felt like I have needed to work in those, for upcoming exhibitions. OIl has taken a back seat.  

I have heard myself telling people that what I like about egg tempera is that it dries so quickly and you can layer in the space of minutes, not days, like with oils. It isn't smelly and the clean up is simple. On Saturday I sat next to an RBA exhibititor at the dinner and she did intricate paintings with 'wet on wet' oils. I had already started this. I think I got out my oils because my last egg tempera felt like it could work better/needed a bigger scale. But after taling to Sue, I has a different attitude to the layers and the oils were different, not more cumbersome.

A5 oil sketch
 Before I began on the first day, I decided to do a small oil sketch on gessoed paper.  I have agreed to donate a few pieces (A5) for a fundraiser, to aid the animals that were affected in the Australian wildfires. I thought perhaps an oil sketch work.
working bigger
 I worked form life.  I realised I needed another motif on the left side, so added a bouquet on the second day to balance out the colour and shapes.
egg tempera Composition and Saint

This was the original idea,  painting.  I used a photo of a bowl/cup to imagine an alternative composition.  In the painting I have done the same.

Thursday, February 20, 2020

Some Visual Storytelling in the 303rd RBA Exhibition

It's all so subjective… the way a painting can reach down into you and make you feel something. Yesterday I visited the Royal Society of British Painters for the private view. I have two pieces in the show and it was fun to see my work on the wall and watch people looking at them, reacting to them, but it was also a chance for me to see the work of those I admire and to speak to a few of the artists to say how much I am inspired by their work. I have chosen a few which, for me, are exquisite pieces of visual story-telling to share.  If you can, go to the exhibit which is on from today through the 29th of Feb.  You can see the catalogue here: https://www.mallgalleries.org.uk/whats-on/exhibitions/royal-society-british-artists-303rd-annual-exhibition-2020



Briget Moore

Bridget Moore 

Bridget Moore, above, tells stories about memories from childhood. As I peer into the windows of her past I am the child and feel my arms stretch, the hoop go round and hear the dog barking. Her beautiful sense of colour, texture, form, composition… these very strong, yet small, paintings stir me.
Robert E Wells
Robert Wells made one of my favourite paintings at last years' exhibition and this year his painting of his daughter was one which my family and I returned to often. He uses paint in a way that tells stories we can all remember too. He also evokes an age of painting and a fight with paint that makes his message especially poignant.

Below are two paintings by Alan Lambirth, but they are not the paintings in the exhibition. Alan doesn't have a presence on the internet, his work is not in the catalogue or in the online catalogue, so you will have to go to the exhibition to see his beautiful, beautifully framed vignettes of life. I think his work is all on the small wall, around the corner from my work.  Like everything I am showing you, I would have any of his on my wall! 
Alan Lambirth

Alan Lambirth Winner of the Michael Harding Award II
'Afternoon Tea'
Richard Sorrel
Richard Sorrel captures humanity with all its flaws.  His gestural people are both beautiful and amusing. Richard works on a small scale and on a large scale!


Shanti Panchal

Shanti Panchal evokes a world where the light is brighter and even the more mundane becomes exotic. I love his sense of colour, the way he builds his surface and how he can conjure a place with a face.
Melissa Scott-Miller
Melissa takes apart london life and reflects it back to us so we are part of it. I have watched her work and her process is unique and results in these slices of London life that are instantly recognizeable and tell her story and our story. Up close the detail and the way she dabs paint unlocks a unique vision.


Annie Boisseau
When I think of Annie Boisseau I think of smaller oils painted on board.  They are each little gems. This luminous oil on canvas stopped us all in our tracks, though… It is bigger and what colour! Annie sketches outside and works in her studio to paint. The quality of light, the abstracted nature of the paint blend to create a place that you want to walk into.

John Pryke does something similar with pastel. His sky makes me look up at all skies, to feel I am there during the day and to promise to look harder the next time I am out at night.
John Pryke
The work I had accepted for this show is different to the work I responded viscerally to at the exhibition.  That is curious.  A few years ago I read Art as Therapy, https://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-as-Therapy-Alain-Botton/dp/0714865915/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=art+as+therapy&qid=1582196235&sr=8-1
by Alan De Boton and John Armstrong  which postulates that one thing we find in art is what we don't have, or what we need in order to balance ourselves. 

I work in a few different media to do different things in the work I make. You can see the variety on my website. https://www.rebeccaguyverart.com 
When I talked to Alan and Bridget we all agreed that you do what you do. When I bumped into Mary (in front of Bridget Moore's work) who I met at a course delivered by Daniel Shadbolt, we agreed that there is something special in ambiguity.
Rebecca Moss Guyver - Colour of Dahlias after Frost
Rebecca Moss Guyver - We Three Kings

A crush of visitors at the Mall Galleries
Hope you get a chance to visit this wonderful show! there was much much more that I liked and loved.  I'm sure you will find your own too.

Monday, February 17, 2020

New model and some dramatic poses

What the post brought, Emily G, pastel drawing in altered sketchbook
It's always fun to draw a new model in Sudbury Life Drawing Group. Emily G is a performance artist who works mostly with children. I was on the side of the room with the light at my back, close to the model, so for once I could see really well. That didn't mean my drawings were better, though. Of the seven I made, these three were the best. Two ten-minute poses and the portrait which was about 25 mins. Emily has some large tattoos.  You can see one peeking over her shoulder.
10 minute pose, Emily G, charcoal on paper

Head back, Emily G, charcoal on paper
Poor Emily found almost immediately that her neck was hurting in this pose, so she tilted her head back further... rather than change the shapes, I left the head unfinished. 

I'm not sure when I made these  pastel drawings in my altered sketchbook, A Bold Venture, of Terry… it may have been the same day as what happened next.
A Shattering Blow, Terry, pastel drawing in altered sketchbook

Quenched Flames, pastel drawing in altered sketchbook

A Friend in Need, pastel drawing in altered sketchbook
The last time I drew Terry I began by covering my paper in vine charcoal and used the subtractive method of drawing to begin. As it turned out, that was a good warm-up for Terry's unusual scenario next...
Add caption

Terry had brought a big piece of plastic sheeting which he draped over himself. It forced even the most figurative of us to work more abstractly.


Thursday, February 13, 2020

Composition and St Francis

Composition and St Francis, egg tempera on panel 16 x 23 cm
There is that game that writers play where they try to put random words in their text.  This still life is certainly a random mix of objects. And I had this idea as I was composing a still life another time that it would be interesting to print out some other objects (besides the myriad that I have collected - too many) to place in front of the actual different objects. Sometimes I change the objects into other objects than are in front of me in the painting process, but in this case it would be declaritvely not what it appears.

Since a still life is really just an arrangement of shapes and colours, by having a paper version of exactly the colour and shape I want, it would be playful and self-conciously direct, I thought - maybe.

I guess it turned out to be Mary Fedden meets surrealism! 

Thursday, February 6, 2020

Inside out and Sauerkraut







Inside Out and Sauerkraut, egg tempera on panel, 30 x 20cm
Sometimes when I set up a still life I get really excited because the beauty of the colour relationships and shapes just feels right. On Sunday, when I put this together (minus the tulips and plums) I couldn't wait to get started.  First I needed some tulips and some fruit. I raced to Stowmarket before the shops shut and had to visit two stores and there were only yellow tulips available. I thought the plums would work. 

From the start, this was a stop and go still life - I've had a busy week. Busy because the first three days of my week I leave the studio for as much as half the day: Once for life drawing; once for portrait group and once for Pilates.  This week I also met up with three artists.  And it was also the culmination of the Impeachment Hearings so my podcasts and live stream filled the studio with intrigue.  

I named the painting from a line in an opinion column, a line that seemed to me like the perfect metaphor for the world we inhabit at the moment. I don't find the radio distracting. Painting takes over and fills my brain -  I turn the 'inside out and Sauerkraut' into something else - dabs of colour on a support, that make me feel happy. Returning to the painting again and again, gave me the opportunity to look again and again and  time to think.  Yesterday I got to that place when I couldn't make what I was painting work and then I remembered that it was time to stop painting exactly what I saw in front of me.  I needed to create a version of the stilllife that had the feel that seeing the colours and shapes had instiled in me when I began.  That's a funny thing I find happens. The most exciting beginnings often become the longest toughest slogs.  Can you tell?

Monday, February 3, 2020

Emily Loosely

Sue wasn't well so we took turns timing.  Emily struck five and ten minute poses and then moved for about fifteen minutes, holding 3 minute poses.  I've chosen these four from the session. I like the top drawing because I worked differently and think the marks had a kind of energy and looseness I can't always find.

The drawing below feels like Emily and I like the drawing, colours and marks.


My sister has been taking an art class and she sent me an image of a wonderful negative space drawing of a rocking chair she'd made 'for homework'.  I think that was in my mind as I took the side of light blue/grey soft pastel and traced around the figure. I like the way I've broken up the space in this one.


And this one is a little silly but makes me feel like dancing.

Friday, January 31, 2020

Getting down to Business and Out of the Studio, with Parker Harris

Yesterday I attended a workshop led by Emma Parker and Penny Harris, the founders of Parker Harris.  It was held at Trinity Buoy wharf, a place I had only dropped off at once, but never explored.  I arrived about an hour early so I could see the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize.  You can read more and see some of it here: http://trinitybuoywharfdrawingprize.drawingprojects.uk/index.php/news 
I was thrilled by the diversity of approaches to drawing and the range of marks.  I lingered a long time at Cornwall-based artist Shelly Tregoning’s drawing, Distracted, Distracted. I liked the current feel of the image, the gestural quality of the work and the unusual mixture of media.  There was lots of other good stuff to inspire me at the exhibition.

There were just under ten of us, I think, at the workshop, all with a range of experience in the art world.  The focus of the session was about THE BUSINESS OF BEING AN ARTIST. After meeting each other, Penny and Emma reminded us that we are the centre of the art world, as artists and that we should 'inhabit' that space. To inhabit the space, I need to do more of all the things that I know I need to do more of in order to be more of who I am, an artist. I need to visit even more shows and openings, go to more artist talks, go to more art fairs, read more art newspapers.  Basically, engage more, but not just go, go more purposefully. For me probably the specific thing I definitely need to do more of is to read more written by artists to embody the language of the art world.  Apparently, Grayson Perry and Anthony Gormley speak about art in a way that is worth paying attention to. 

It's funny, just before the talk began I was speaking to another artist, Laura Jacobs, http://www.laurajacobsart.com who had spent time in NYC. We had touched on the NY way of asserting oneself and the purposefulness it instills. By nature, I think I am purposeful so having a plan before I go to an opening, whether it is mine or anothers' is something I do because that's the way I am.  It was good to be reminded that there is a fine line between professional and officious, though.  I still wince when I think about the first time I had work in the Pastel Society and I was a little too keen to talk to John Tookey about my work - knew I stepped over the line and have felt annoyed with myself about it ever since… and that was nearly twenty years ago! 

In general, I really love talking to people at openings and see life as an opportunity.  If I had unlimited resources, I would choose to go to everything. When I have work in opens, I spend as much time as I can at the show, go to all the gatherings and love every minute of it. I talk to people who look carefully at my work and give out cards.  I could go to more artist talks and our daughter, who writes about art says she'll come with me (although alone is ultimately better).  So… I guess more of the same!

'LISTEN' as well as read carefully was a refrain of the day. Perhaps my wonderful year as drawing scholar with the NEAC gave me an opportunity to develop the skill of listening better,  and using what I experience later, but when it comes to reading and synthesising what I need to respond to… and specifically in the context of criteria and questions when applying for residencies and bursaries;  I find, inevitably when I re-read my answers to some of the questions on applications I realise that I haven't said what I mean to say clearly enough or answered the exact question and then I need to spend lots of extra time rewriting the exact answer. That is definitely something to be aware of and something which could be streamlined for me in the future!

One of my goals this year is to find a residency, apply and win it! Not getting through the first round of the Funded 1 Month Artist Residency in Rural Northumberland - Unison Colour, a residency I read about and worked really hard at was very disappointing, but without applying to more opportunities I will never succeed in this!

Something Emma and Penny spoke about, that I have grown to be aware of, is the need to budget, plan and have a goal.  By deciding what you can afford time/money to spend on applying, paying for gallery fees, travel to London (each time I go down it costs me £28-50 for the train, underground  £10, car park  £10 - 15…) you can make better choices and waste less time and money. My resolution that I was only going to enter two things in any opens, is one of those shifts I have made that has made me happier and feel more in control. It has also helped me to make choices about what my best work is. I do ask people to help me choose, though too.  On social media people like to choose between work.  Sometimes you get lots of different responses, though.

Reading about the judges is something I do but I'm sure I could plan that more by being conscious of all of those variables as I embark on making work that might be the piece I choose for the open.  Then, my work might have better chances of success.

Emma and Penny talked about the 'elevator pitch'.  I have only just started to say I am a 'visual storyteller'.  By thinking about my work, understanding what I like to paint and draw about and giving it a name, I feel better equipped to answer questions about my work. Certainly, one of the goals I scribbled in my book yesterday was to find a way to describe my work better - reading Perry and Gormley might help! Today when I had a studio visit by a group that I will leading workshops for/showing in I learned that on my website I call myself primarily a 'pastel artist'. I hired our daughter to come and help me redo my website last night (after the talk) so hopefully I will reflect myself to the world better after that. You can see my website here: https://www.rebeccaguyverart.com and send me suggestions here: 

As far as social media goes, I do it, but I don't do it as well as I might.  I was sorry to miss Emma's talk on that last week, but I didn't think I could afford another trip to London, so will spend some time learning about it online. ONE DAY A WEEK on BUSINESS is an appropriate amount of time!

Emma's helpful explanation that in a hashtag, 1,000 is better than 1,000,000 because the stream goes by more slowly - is a game changer! I need to link up all my online shop fronts and get some new business cards printed, and postcards.

Another thing that I learned is that IT'S NOT CHEATING to put the solo shows that took place not in galleries as solo shows on my CV. and I should put my curatorial experience on my CV as well. 

As far as 'getting a gallery' I remember the old days when Jack and Bob were represented by Kraushaur and their lives revolved around that gallery. I guess it's not like that anymore, much. I don't have to get up and think I am failing because I haven't taken my slides around to galleries like I did when I was just starting out. Having a portfolio of opportunities may suit me best anyway. But what is important is that I set a few realistic goals again this year and I promise to take part, be efficient and be nice.

Thank you Emma and Penny, it was a great workshop!