Drawing, pastels and mono-prints

I take inspiration from everything around me be it the animals, objects, flowers, the landscape or interior settings of our home. Drawing is always important and is where I start whether using charcoal, pencil, pastels, or making monoprints; if ever I find myself blocked, I draw my way out of it. 

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Printmaking denotes a particular way of seeing because slight variations on the same drawing can be made and tried again and again. The marks and textures are a vocabulary just as they are with any other means of expression, but additionally, intention and accident can more easily be merged and controlled. I am particularly fond of black and white imagery because there is so much variation to work with; many tonal possibilities and so many variations in the way that marks can be made. 

Working with colour is another whole dimension where I have learnt to adhere to a strictly limited palette especially when using pastels; the addition of colour to all the above variations of mono chrome can be mind boggling. However, there are no limits to how many mediums I might use at one time: I am no longer a purist and will try anything that I can make work. Many of my mono-prints begin with drawings followed by making and using simple paper stencils and then adding various pastels and paint. These most recent mono-prints have developed out of finding a way to teach print making, without my etching press, to people of hugely varying ability.

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Composing a picture is the first building block; if the composition goes wrong so does everything else. If I work from nature I spend a great deal of time selecting a position and lining things up; looking at the negative spaces and working out how they will interact with the positive ones. This positive /negative interaction is ideally represented in printmaking where one operates in both directions tonally. Working with still-life is different again because you totally control the elements; one can change, move around and deselect elements that do not fit or you just do not like. When drawing from life, (as with animals or people), the composition comes from within and there is no time to rearrange what you see. Although there are many disparate ways of looking at the world I return again and again to the same themes. 

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I bring my animals, pots, flowers and furniture both metaphorically, and physically, into my studio and forge relationships with objects both inside and out. I use Indian and African textiles as a backcloth for still life, the landscape through the window, or I set up to draw from the fields or garden outside. Sometimes the decorative ‘cloth’ animals take on more life than the pots in front of them. I wonder where this will take me? The one thing about art is that you should never limit yourself by knowing the answer before you start or indeed even when you finish.