Pastels for detail - Inspirations

One of the inspiration for the wall textures was an article I read about the artist Sarah Bee . What struck me in her atmospheric landscape of English countryside was the way in which she provides intriguing detail of nature's textures such as hill and cliff slopes, moody pine forests and of standing stones.

Many of these have high horizon lines - just take a look at the standing stones for instance. - This, along with the level of detail in the foreground , makes the viewer become part of the scene quickly.

One painting that I found particularly fascinating was one of a chalky cliff face, again, painted from a low point. The limestone cliff took up two-thirds of the painting (Cliffs at Slapton Sands, 76x46cm) - beautifully rendered in muted beige, sandy greys with just a few structural lines of the rock visible and at the cliff top some bushes and low trees. - The painting made the cover of the June 2007 The Artist magazine:


I had been grappling with detailed texture for some time before I stumbled across these paintings. The ways in which they combine acrylics and pastels and explore density and small-scale textures was a true find for me - I ended up taking the article around with me for some time. So far, it has translated into the Textured Walls, but a plein air outing is still waiting to get closer to small-scale patterns in nature.

Textured wall series

Textured Wall no 1, pastel on board, 50x70cm


This is the first of so far three paintings on wall textures. Most of my paintings until recently have been landscapes with relatively little detail (maybe bar foreground). Wanting to experiment with more detailed textures and colour changes, I was looking round the studio and found plenty of cracks, fissures and marks on the walls.

This was the first one of them - it's on board primed with gesso and texture added with pumice powder. Then I applied an acrylic underpainting and various splashes of more acrylic paint on top of that.

Lemon yellow as underpainting was quite a discovery too - it offsets and plays with the other, more subtle colours rather beautifully I think.