Time, swirling of colour, pushing the form and holding ones breath as you layer the gold.
My garden is infused with wild violets, nasturtiums, wild geraniums, camomile, chocolate cosmos, tulips, daisies, marigolds, blossom of pear, apricot, apple and plum trees, rosemary, sage, thyme, poppies, borage and so many more pushing their way through the earth entangling among each other, forming a rich carpet for insects to settle onto.
Water colour flowers
“Pictures are spiritual beings. The soul of the painter lives within them.” Emil Nolde
When working I value the research to open my eyes and see new excitements before me. Emil Nolde's water colours of his flowers from his garden fill me with excitement and wonder. The bold use of brushstroke, colour and composition enlighten the soul with the energy that arrives with each bloom. I am lost in the fusion of colour as they bleed together.
Water colour tablets from my grand parents Mary and Patrick Adlam
I have two water colour tin sets of Windsor and Newton water colours, I regularly have to replenish the small cubes of intense coulour. I was given them by my grand mother mary Adlam as I embarked on my voyage into making art, and gradually the cubes of colour have washed water colour papers with their brushes handed onto me.
One holder is of my grand father's Patrick Adlam, it is a blue metal tin stained with his mixes and battered by numerous tumbles to the floor. When I arrived in England as my parents divorced he spent his time teaching me the magic of drawing and water colours from nature. I would collect specimens and he would instruct me in the biology of their form and how to create an illusion of them. I was 8 years old. He dribbled the paint on to the paper, scratching it at times with his sable brush and encourage me to engage in the same wonder of recording. I remember one incident of him dribbling and scribbling over with a colouring pencil and to my horror it looked messy, obscure and unrecognisable. "That" he pronounced "is the start of confidence, because I do not care what anyone thinks, it is also emotional, you saw how I puffed and forced the image to arrive, I can describe it an impression and eventually I will make it abstract." It was his way of explaining how artists and movements arrive.
Guilding
Gilding is an art layering pure pigments held in the glue of rabbits bones and holding ones breath as you brush down the thin sheets of metal to the surface. It clings to textures and there is a magic in the way it covers the surfaces. I use silver and gold with the my water colour flowers as halos of sunlight or drenched in moonlight.