A peek into my creative process.

Big Stormy Sky

I have been re-engaging with my painting practice recently. Over the last few years I have predominantly created one of a kind monotypes, which I often work into with other materials. I keep a sketchbook and like to explore different techniques in there, however, I love to work bigger. when I completed my MA in Fine Art and Education I worked on large format canvases, which were well over 1m. I loved the process here and enjoyed working to such scale, but I don't have the ability to store or transport works of this size at the moment.

I have found a happy medium in working at about 50cm square for paintings. Big enough to get my teeth into, but easily storable and easy to ship and transport.

The Estuary

I continue to work on my Seaspace series. My style has changed quite a lot over the years and I try to capture more of the feel of the place than trying to capture a pictorial representation. As such, my paintings often go through several stages. Today I'd like to share the development stages of one of my paintings. This one is called 'The Estuary' and is based on a view I pass regularly on my daily walks, just a couple of miles from my home on the Northumberland coast. It's painted with Acrylic paint on a standard edge canvas. Most of my acrylics at the moment are Daler Rowney System 3.

This is the beginnings of a new painting. I'd just finished working on another piece and decided to use up the paint I'd already dispensed to block in my composition. At this stage, I don't worry about detail, I just apply the colour quickly and try to get the shapes I want and get rid of that blank canvas feel. Then I leave my work and think about it for a while.

Originally, I thought that this might be a quite realistic painting and I began to apply the underpainting in the right sort of colours. I love bright colours and have a tendency to want to use them everywhere - reign it in Claire!!! So here we have the shape more clearly defined - you can see the beach and sea and river quite clearly.

As I progressed with this, I started to add details of the buildings in the background and more detail to the sky. These are the rough shapes and not supposed to be fine details. It was going ok, I took a break and spent some time looking at it. I do this a lot. If I'm unsure about a painting I will often pop in on the easel and have it on display so I can look at it and see how it wants to be developed, sometimes just a few hours, the longest I've left something like this was about 6 months.

I wasn't feeling it, it seemed too still. It was starting to look like the place rather than capturing the emotion of the place. I swapped out the small brushes for the big ones and began to make more gestural marks. I stand up for this, often using my whole body to create the marks needed (I can be quite messy at this stage and often work outside during the summer months). You can start to see the brush strokes and movement of the paint.

It did not quite capture the feeling and movement of the place, so out came the pallette knives, cardboard and the biggest brushes I have. Paint is scraped over the surface or dry brushed, allowing some of the previous layers to show through and create that ellusive personal sense of place that comes through painting. At this stage I slow down - just so I know when enough is enough. It's so easy to overwork and miss something. Just a few minor careful adjustments and I decided that it was where I wanted it to be.

I'm often asked how long it takes me to create a painting. It takes a lifetime. It takes all the training, skills, knowledge, experience, fails and successes to create each one. To construct the physical painting can take anything from a few hours to a few days, but sometimes, months or even years. Sometimes I don't create work for months, but I'm constantly thinking, considering, collecting visual source materials and ideas, which eventually coalesce into an idea which eventually becomes a series of works. This process often takes two years or longer. My current series has been in development for about 18 months and I'm still not done with it yet.

I hope that you enjoyed this glimpse into my creative process. I'd love to hear about your creativity too.

Both of these paintings have been sold, but open edition prints are available on my Saatchi shop and Gifts with these images are available to buy on Redbubble.