Painting with your iPhone or iPad?
You can apply paint with just about anything to hand, literally anything that will hold paint, but within reason of course. On Sky Arts Portrait Artist of The Year they paint using their iPhones and I pad's, maybe even the occasional Android device, but I have yet to see a contestant scoop up some paint with an iPhone 11 and boldly scrape it across the canvas; maybe they should, who knows what might happen. They generally make use of the screen to bypass the information directly in front of them, information gathered with their eyes; the digital likeness is seen by many as more dependable and takes precedence over human vision. But that is a post for another day.
I am extremely interested in the materials artists use and the tools they apply those materials with. I rarely use brushes in my current work, not because I have an allergy or aversion to hairs and bristles, I have worked with paint brushes extensively and they allow great control and precision, they can also be used with considerable spontaneity and invention.
However, with paint brushes, I find myself returning to a repertoire of marks and painterly qualities that become entirely predictable. The introduction of unconventional materials in my work has been both liberating and challenging.
Embedded within this painting called 'Shallow Lands' is cold wax medium, oil paint, bitumen, pumice stone, enamel, earth and tissue paper. At one point it included dried seed heads but they have been removed because the undermined the fragile illusion of space and perspective. I describe my working method as a process of accretion, the slow build-up of successive layers and I'm sure that many painters will identify with this approach.
I establish the first layers with rollers or brayers, enabling broad areas of the canvas to be swiftly blocked in. After that, any form of strict sequence or logical progression tends to break down with different materials applied in different orders, just to see what happens. I am on the lookout for unexpected combinations and interactions between surfaces, hence the constant revision, scraping, sanding, burning to arrive at a new destination. I haven't yet started painting with my phone yet, that maybe just a matter of time, but I do use an assortment of palette knives, orbital sanders, heat guns, scrapers, sticks, crumpled paper, cellophane and corrugated card. It's a messy business and I am thinking of including disposable gloves in my next piece, made from100% recyclable plastic of course.
This composition is really the notion of a landscape reduced to its basic elements, earth, sky and horizon with minimal embellishment. With a central vanishing point there is a clear reference to aerial and linear perspective and the title confirms both the topography of the Fenland location and the 'shallow' relief modelling. This is a land existing, for the moment at least, below sea level.
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About Artist
I am a UK based abstract landscape painter/artist with a range of compelling and popular original mixed media paintings available to buy. You can follow my artistic practices, latest artworks and painting techniques and news by reading my contemporary art blog.
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Previous Exhibitions
I am a British artist based in Ely, Cambridgeshire and my work is sought by collectors here in the UK and worldwide. I have exhibited recently at the Battersea Affordable Art Fair, The Babylon Gallery in Ely, The Art in East Anglia Gallery, in Bury St Edmunds, The Darryl Nantais Gallery in Linton, The Michael House Centre and The Locker cafe in Cambridge. I also have collections of my artwork in prestigious office settings in major towns and cities throughout the country.
Materials Used
I work in mixed media, oil, cold wax, acrylic, bitumen and on both medium and large-scale canvases. My techniques involve a range of techniques and processes including, drawing, painting, collage, printing and mixed media applications. My main subject matter is landscape and abstraction and many of my paintings are located somewhere between figurative and non-figurative approaches to image-making.
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