Abstract Landscape Painter. Rural Dweller. Lover of Modernist Art and Design.
Absorption
I often get asked about what inspires my painting. The answer is really numerous things, although one of the major sources of input is that which is around me. Basically, what I see in my surroundings is continually feeding into my thought processes and being mixed up somehow with all my feelings and musings about daily life. It's as if I'm some sort of recording system, continually taking in sensations and impressions of the environment. The work that I produce is about atmosphere and what it is like to be in a certain place at a certain time.
I'm very lucky to live and work where I do. I love the shapes, textures and colours of the English landscape and the continual changes that the light causes - sometimes subtle shifts, sometimes dramatic effects. Every time that I look out of the large studio window the sky is a slightly different colour.
Some people love to travel far and wide around the globe. In a lifetime they may encounter many different vistas, peoples, shapes and colours and have widely differing experiences. For me, rather than a widely observed world, the little valley that I live in is a microcosm. I have the daily opportunity to observe small changes and this is a different kind of privilege. The traveller can experience and record the exotic, I can observe the contemplative - looking at the same thing over and over again and being very aware of small changes. Slow consideration - the first appearance of buds, changes in the colour of the light as the days pass, the colour of the surface of a field as millions of shoots begin to emerge from the earth.
In the studio this happens with objects and images with which I surround my easel. In my peripheral vision I will pin up images that I like. They are not in my direct line of sight as I work. They are usually perpendicular to the painted surface, on both sides of me, and laid below my field of vision to the left and the right. For example, I have a print of a painting by Vanessa Bell, faded postcards of paintings by Ivon Hitchens and Mark Rothko, photographs that I took of the interior of a boutique hotel interior with lots of bright, contemporary design, and photographs of our valley in the snow. Pages torn from magazines with patterns on, pieces of textiles from 1950's collections by designers such as Lucienne Day and a Christmas card by Mary Newcombe. Pictures of my garden, work by Barbara Rae and Archibald McIntosh and a postcard of an icon from a Norwegian museum. What I find is that I tend to absorb these by a kind of osmosis. I don't really need to practice mixing the colours in them that I like because I find that they "accidentally" get included in a piece. I will often look at a finished, or partly finished painting and think, "there are the colours of that Rothko", or, as I did with my last painting, "there are the colours of that Vanessa Bell portrait". Strangely enough, I had been looking at that picture repeatedly and trying to calculate how the colours were mixed, and then, without consciously trying, I had started to use the whole set. My brain had solved the problem for me and just being around the painting daily had taught me something new about mixing and combining colours.
All text and images ©2013 Carol Saunderson
Painting is a detail from "Bright Light on a Windy Day"
