Inspiration

My last blog was full of woe and misery and so I thought I’d write something more upbeat this time. I’ve been floundering around inspiration wise at various points this year, and it’s hard to feel inspired when work isn’t selling and will go straight under your bed when it’s done. I had to have a bit of an attitude readjustment though, if I’m to continue to progress and create work that I’m proud of. It’s also easy to get locked into your sense of ‘this is what I paint’, because that is what you’ve always painted and galleries and customers come to expect it. I’m lucky to have worked with some lovely galleries over the years, and they’ve always been great at supporting my changes of direction. But you might have noticed that I mainly paint the sea, and so it’s easy to get ‘stuck’. Earlier in the year I decided that I wanted to push myself out of my comfort zone and so I focused on painting woodlands. I love the forest, with the abundance of nature and the overwhelming buzz that you get from all the oxygen. Because of this, it was easy to branch out into tree paintings, forgive the pun. But this change of direction wasn’t straightforward, it was hard! Painting with varying colours that you’ve not used before is challenging. Trying to figure out how light works on trees, between trees and shining on the ground among trees is hard! Sunbeams are hard!! You get the point. So I practised and practised, scouring the internet and social media for photos of trees that I would love to try and capture. The research element of my job is incredibly important and is one of those invisible parts of the job that takes hours. Finding pictures takes time, but the process of unpicking the picture takes equally long, following streams of light, seeing how flowers changed colours whether they were in the light or the shade. The mental energy that goes in to storing away those nuances, the little details, can be quite exhausting. It’s like studying - you just need to put the hours in.

So I’d like to tell you that all that work suddenly paid off and my treescapes flew off the shelves. But they didn’t. Some of them got a good response on social media, but my brand identity is being a seascape artist. I know, saying that I have a ‘brand’ sounds ridiculous but the way that businesses work now is that you have to have a clear point of view or you’ll disappear in amidst a sea of other struggling artists. So what happens when you move away from that identity… well people don’t like it because that’s not what they know you for. So the trees didn’t inspire. People want my seascapes. But as you know, they weren’t selling either (thanks financial crisis for stymying my art career progress) and so I found myself back to the beginning, with inspiration running low again.

I never have been one to give up though, and I love this beautiful world of art that I’ve found myself stumbling into, and so I had to try again. I had spent a lot of time painting pretty seascapes and close up waves, so I decided to spend a bit of time just focusing on the less than perfect views, or the wild, gloomy seas that Scottish weather brings. I had to stop intellectualising my paintings (did I mention that I do that too? I like to research and compare and then do some analysis of the information and statistics that my social media and website gives me). My heart needed to determine what I painted next, and not my head. But the work still needs to go in to research; to find inspiration and photographs that I could use to create new work. On that note, I rarely copy a whole photograph (I do get permission if I do). Sometimes I’ll use a composition but use my own colour scheme, or I’ll use a sea or a sky and mix and match them. Or I’ll add my favourite silhouette in the background, to make it a mystical, foreign place. On the odd occasion I will use a specific coast or shoreline, which some people really like. People can be delightfully sentimental about places that they have fond memories of. sometimes it limits the sales appeal for other people though, who may like the painting but don’t have an affection for the specific location. With this in mind I decided to think about where I’m sentimental about. I kept coming back to the same place; Lofoten, Norway. You may have seen photos of the Lofoten islands, with the astonishing mountains like dragon’s teeth, and the deep red of the fishing hut style houses, that cling to the shore line. The wild remoteness of these islands captivates me. And so I scoured the internet for photos of them. There are so many of them: wintery photos , photos of the mountains under the northern lights and also the picture perfect houses in the beauty of the summer. But that’s not how I wanted them… I wanted them wild, raw and intimidating. I wanted wild skys and violent seas. So I did what I do and I painted them as I wanted. I took inspiration from a painter called Peider Balke, who was in impressionist painter in the late 19th century, who painted the north of Norway in the the depths of winter. His work inspires me and it was exciting to paint in a similar style. I did a series of smaller paintings that felt good. I did a few bigger ones that also felt authentic. I’m still very much in this expressive phase, which is rather blissful. It’s so nice to feel inspired… watch this space…