back to blogIn 2018 I was lucky enough to be awarded an artist residency at Brisons Veor in Cornwall. Brisons Veor is a residential workspace set in an inspiring and unique location away from the day-to-day distractions. This is part three of my blog documenting my stay in this beautiful location.
For someone who works full time, two weeks of painting time is a luxury and over the years I have trained myself to utilise the free time I have to get on and paint. This wasn't always the case as I used to have to spend time thinking about what I fancied painting and then procrastinate over images to work with and tidying the studio.
Those days are long gone now and any free time I have I crack on and start creating. To help me to this I like to do some small paintings on paper as warm up exercises.
This was no different at Brisons Veor and each day I would set myself by initially spend an hour on loosening up and getting those creative juices flowing. But that didn't quite go to plan as I started to get drawn into these small paintings, working into them until they were finished paintings.
What I found as I was going along was how much my work was being influenced by the landscape and ever changing weather.
Big Skies at Brisons Veor.
Changing Light at Brisons Veor.
Cliff top walk to Sennen.
A strange light at Brisons Veor.
With each day a new palette resulted in a different series of paintings. The result was a visual diary of the weather and my walks around Brisons Veor and in total over 50 paintings were produced.
My main reason for applying for a residency at Brisons Veor was to experience the isolation and solitude and focus on my work without the daily distractions of life. I am generally drawn to paint the weather and its impact on the land so I was really pleased to see how the landscape and weather influenced my work.
In terms of lessons learned I really would have liked to explore the landscape further. I was very conscious that I was there for 2 weeks and that time was very precious and I was really reluctant to take more than a few hours out of each day to walk.
Many of these paintings have now been sold but I wanted to do something with the collection of paintings so I am looking at reproducing my daily diary on this blog in the next month. Individually the paintings stand up on their own but as a collection they are something else and I would like to recreate the studio wall again at Brisons Veor!
