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.