Category: Paintings

The Burning Landscape #1

This weeks fortnightly creative prompt over on Red’s Kingdom is the painting – Vesuvius in Eruption by Joseph Mallord William Turner. I was awestruck by the colours of turners painting, especially the light and darkness and contemplated about how the land after Mount Vesuvius would have been teamed in nothing but dark ash and charred to a crisp. The suffocating poison smoke billowing into the air, the wispy remains of trees and how the lava would have cemented over the landscape. I decided to seep through the surplus of landscape photography I have of of rural Ireland and gave a whirl of harmonising in apocalyptic darker hues to turn my photography into the style of ruinous oil paintings. Here is some mixed media images created by digitally painting over my photography of those images of rural Ireland.

Abstractions #1

Recently being introduced to the shapely creations of Charles Sheeler as well as visiting an exhibition of Milton Avery has left me bubbling with inspiration. What was so interesting about Milton Avery’s work and the way the exhibition was laid out, showed that throughout his career his paintings started to boil down to its core essence of pure unfiltered blocks of colour. Avery become inspired by friends such as Mark Rothko and his once detailed paintings were abstracted into lovely shapes as he became noted as a master of colour. Seeing his art in person really feels makes it feel that way. Here is some initial abstracted digital paintings created after absorbing the work of both Sheeler and Avery. I very much enjoy creating this way, sometimes the paintings feel like a jigsaw puzzle with the puzzle being to always work out what colours work well together. It always feels cathartic when the overall composition feels balanced. More on the way and I am also excited to announce that a print store is coming very very soon.

Mirage #2

A second set of images created for this weeks kick about over on Red’s Kingdom inspired by the paintings of Augustus Osbourne Lamplough. Creating these images uses a few different methods of mixing different mediums, First the images of the initial landscapes were captured on camera, then they were transformed in the edit by adding more yellows and browns to the already parched landscape, finally adding multiples of different shapes on top of each other with low opacities to emulate the layered effects of Lamplough’s watercolour paintings. 

Mirage #1

This weeks kick about over on Red’s Kingdom is the paintings of Augustus Osbourne Lamplough. When I recently came back to London after experiencing the greens of Ireland I was taken aback with how brown and muddy the earth felt, the grass crispy under my feet, the leaves and flowers with burnt liver spots. The world was well and truly scorching alive with a wave of heat that follows your every move. Sweating, I set out with my camera in the sweltering heat to explore the torrid areas and capture similar landscapes to Lamplough’s work, the park near my house where I run every day being the main jumping off point, coupled with the coloured slats, trucks and caravans in the midst of setting-up shop for a funfair. I wanted to explore taking the photos that step further – upping the exaggeration by adding a plethora of different shapes hinting at some civilisation in the distance. But is it nothing more than a mirage?