New collection

Over the last couple of months I have been working on a new collection of work for the Hope Gallery in Hebden Bridge.

There was a clear brief from Caroline and that was to create some bright pieces for her gallery. As a painter who leans more towards the darker side of the colour range I did wonder whether I would be able to pull this off, especially as it was the middle of winter and quite frankly I do like my clouds of doom!

However, during the course of 2021 my 100 day project collection did challenge me to broaden my colour range and a recent collection of work with the Biscuit Factory in Newcastle was my most colourful series of paintings since my Brisons Veor residency.

What I came to realise quite quickly over the course of 2021 was that my main area of interest was light and how that moved across a landscape. I played with transitions from darks to lights with whatever palette I was using and used transparent colours to create depth and atmosphere.

Colour palette

So my new collection I stuck to a limited palette:

Titanium white
A warm colour such as cadmium yellow deep or Indian yellow
Two dark colours such as indigo and burnt umber
A turquoise based blue such as cerulean blue or phthalo turquoise

I have an obscene range of turquoise colours in my paint box to choose from! What is it about the colour turquoise that draws us to it?

The turquoise blues mixed with varying amounts of white helped to keep these painting bright... it also helped to be dreaming about my 3 week sojourn to Cornwall in April / May!

The paintings

So here are the results of my efforts over the last few months. 5 paintings in total, two on wood and 3 on paper, all of which will be heading off to Hope gallery early in February.