Skin Fatea Magazine Showcase

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I’m delighted to have been selected for inclusion in the Fatea Showcase Session download. Fatea Magazine have regular curated selections of contemporary folk music, one for each season. My song is included in the Spring season of 2024 under the umbrella title of ‘Spring’

This curated selection of songs can be downloaded from the Fatea website here but only for a limited time! The idea is that if any music that catches your ears, that you follow up on those musicians/bands and listen to more of their work and lend their support. Many thanks to Fatea for the inclusion.

https://www.fatea-showcase-sessions.co.uk/

A New Series of Work Inspired by Medieval Imagery

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A Knight Studiously Avoids a Lady in Distress (Feb 2024)

For the last few months I’ve been feeling an ever-increasing amount of stress over: “Argh What Work Will I Do?” for an upcoming project involving me embroiling my art with the music I make and vice versa. What I want is my songs to inspire my art and vice versa, so that both creative practices inform one another and form part of a cohesive whole rather than being two entirely separate disciplines that I do.

It’s important for me though that it’s obvious to a viewer/listener that there’s a connection when viewing and listening simultaneously, rather than something tenuous. Someone suggested once to simply paint my paintings with my music playing behind them. Yes, I do this on my TikTok, sometimes…but I wanted my art to be more than just a disconnected backdrop to my music of an entirely different subject matter.

My plan to combine the two however was great in theory, but in practice I felt the work I’ve been doing recently just somehow didn’t feel right for it, yet I just couldn’t work out how to represent songs within that style of painting.

In my last series I’d returned to something that comes naturally to me, a more graphic, illustrative style plus nature, people, creatures, myths, fairytales all tangled together. However, the methodology for doing them is quite slow. The paintings are not planned in advance. I start and then layer and layer and layer paint and images over one another until I find a composition I like. This lengthy process is also made even longer by my use of acrylic paint. It dries quickly which is why I like it, but there’s just not enough pigment in it to give the coverage I want*. This results in my adding layer over layer of the same colour to get the desired result, or to be able to sufficiently cover over what I’ve painted beneath.

Yes, this could be solved by my working out the composition beforehand, but somehow whatever way my brain works, I lose interest in an artwork if I know what its going to look like before I’ve even started. The joy for me is seeing ‘what happens’ and getting a surprise by what I come up with. I felt that for this music+art idea that trying to create paintings as I had been and also writing, recording, promoting and performing my songs was never going to work just due to time constraints and that something had to give – that something being my painting methodology.

I started thinking about some kind of narrative way of painting, which led me to imagery in Medieval manuscripts and embroidery of the same period. This is something I’ve always enjoyed looking at due to the beautiful colours and crisp illustrative style. I also researched folk art because what both have in common are a pared-down often naïve style, as well as pattern and decoration and also figures, animals and nature, and sometimes mythical beasts, subjects dear to me and featuring prominently in my previous series and earlier works.

One thing I love about many of these folk and Medieval images is that people are different scales, or appear to float in the air, due to the flattened perspective. Everything has an air of dreamy unreality. Another thing I love is the often quirky imagery – as is catalogued here – sword-wielding rabbits, men-snails, monsters, Medieval art is full of strange, violent and wonderous imagery, but because it’s quite cartoony looking, somehow that knocks the edges off the more disturbing themes.

This is something else I wanted to tweak with my art. I personally love the strange and quirky and surreal, but felt a sea-change in my mood and outlook on life at the beginning of this year, 2024 and I wanted that reflected in the art I do. So, now out is any creepy, unsettling imagery and in for this season at least (!) is cute and quirky instead. I’m allowing myself to continue to use my imagination (a key part of my process), but not in an off-putting way. I’d prefer viewers to enjoy and smile at any oddness included in my art rather than be repulsed by them. Also in are predominantly pastel tones, though I’m partial to charcoal and black and white imagery too!

I did a few trials in a sketchbook and it took a while for my brain to get used to spreading out landscapes and imagery across a page and to paint things in a flat way after trying to do the opposite, but suddenly it clicked and just feels ‘right’ in a way I can’t quite explain. The first finished piece on canvas is the above painting ‘A Knight Studiously Avoids a Lady in Distress’.

I always enjoy creating my artwork, but I enjoyed this in a way that felt so right for me as if that last jigsaw piece had finally slotted into place. This style of work is designed to allow the viewer to create some kind of narrative, but also (the key point) because these paintings tell a story, any created specifically to go with my songs allows easily for lyrics to be interpreted visually.

I’ll be making prints of all these works, it just might take some time as I need to photograph them or get them professionally scanned first. Keep an eye on this blog or my socials for updates regarding print versions for sale. If you’ve any you’d like to purchase or want a print version of any work not yet in my shop get in touch to enquire. Otherwise original art and prints can be purchased here

*re: acrylic paint’s lack of coverage – I’m going to try acrylic-gouache which apparently has the pigmentation and flatness of gouache but with the waterproof aspects of acrylic.