I love texture and apply paint to canvas instinctively, with a pallet knife, brushes, sponges even my hands – applying layer after layer of colour. I am very gestural in my approach and the act of painting is as important as the subject, applying the paint is a memory, a celebration, ultimately a search for a beauty and intimacy that resonates with the viewer.
If you look at my instgram feed below you will some many photos and reels from my practice including photos of things that inspire me. I work with landscape and still life. I paint outside, ‘en plein air’ but also from memory and also aspirational landscapes – like snowscapes painted from photographs and memory. Recent jaunts have seen me up on the South Downs and Ashdown Forest.
‘I love to ‘go missing’ in the landscape, forgetting everything, just feeling my own space and getting back in touch with myself again. Today’s life is so busy and it can be hard to find time connect fully with nature or your inner world. This inner world of imagination and fantasy combined with experiences from travels and places are pivotal aspects of my work. There is also an underlying narrative to many of my paintings and some reflect on the search for those quiet places, thoughts on the transience of life, people and places remembered.
When I paint I feel my way emotionally through imaginary landscapes or landscapes which are remembered or totally inspired by materials. My ‘paint marks are equivalents for a journey through paint, they are paint poems. The experience of exploring colours and watching the painting emerge is as real as being in nature. Much of my artwork reflects on things felt and seen and what I call the ‘unseen.’
Often I overlap landscape, still life or figures as part of my belief that everything is connected and I want to convey something about this unity.
Jacqui Painter, Upstream, 80x60cm Acrylic on canvas
Jacqui Painter is an Brighton-based Abstract painter. She studied Fine Art/Painting and graduated from Brighton University in 1994. Her paintings are intuitive and expressive, the intention being to allow whatever wants to comes through, without resistance. The outcome is organic and elemental along with urban coastal influences.
‘I rarely have a plan of what I’m about to paint. I begin and let the painting emerge in its own way. Expressing myself through painting is about the connection I have with myself and other. In its purest form painting is true freedom to express where I am at within my internal space, at any given moment.’
Jacqui has participated in exhibitions in London and Brighton, including being selected for the Sussex Contemporary exhibition held at the Brighton i360 in September ‘23. She is also a member of the ArtCan collective. Jacqui has sold her work in both the UK and America.
From 1986 to 1996 I owned a restaurant in Brighton and sold it when I became hooked on ceramics at an evening class. So that I could study the subject further. I spent five years at college, studying photography and plastics as well as ceramics. When I graduated in 2001, I took out a lease on workshop premises in Hove, and sublet spaces to other artists/craftspeople. Since then I have exhibited and sold my work at art fairs and galleries throughout the British Isles. In 2004 I won an award for Best Newcomer at BCTF, and have written features for their magazine “The Craftsman’. I took a post grad in teaching and learning in HE, and have worked part-time as a tutor at Northbrook College, Brighton University and HMP Ford.
My inspiration comes from flowers and plants that we see all around us, in gardens, fields even cracks in the pavement. I particularly love the secret worlds inside these flowers, in the patterns and textures hidden away that give a continuing sense of promise and renewal.
Until 2005 my work had been mainly in the domestic & functional arena, but then I decided to work on larger, often one off, sculptural pieces. So far, I have concentrated on the forms of seed pods and fruiting bodies which ties in with my earlier work, but which looks completely different.
I like to play with scale and will often imagine the size that a plant must appear to an insect…what is it about the flower that attracts or repels? Often I will scale my sculpture up so that we can have an ‘insects eye view’ of it.
I work in stoneware, throwing the basic shape of the sculpture, then I alter and model onto it. This gives me a certain speed and control which is the way I prefer to work. My pieces are high fired so that they can go into an interior or exterior environment.
My glazes are chosen to compliment the form and are often slightly chrystalline or irradescent, this makes the pieces glow.
Most sculptures are fabricated entirely from sheet metal but some introduce mixed media in the form of salvaged or drift wood to enhance the representation of nature. Others are made entirely from scrap metal: reusing materials and reforming them into a beautiful piece of art which reflects nature and which, somehow, seems a fitting way of demonstrating the ongoing worth of the materials often so readily discarded.
Many of the artist’s pieces are an observation of nature, using this man-made material to capture the unique movement, character and alertness for which animals and birds are so much loved and which makes these sculptures such a popular personal art choice.
I studied Fine Art at Liverpool Art school from 1999-2001 achieving a First Class BA Honours degree in painting.Colour is my thing. The power of a mark on a canvas and the places these marks can take you is my fix. Viewing Monet’s cinematic waterlily paintings in Paris gave me the confidence to paint on a large scale and this continues to motivate me. A large canvas can envelope the viewer into an extraordinary dimension of energy and feeling.
My paintings are abstract celebrations of nature, memories and experiences.Travel and nature inspire me, as well as the sensations that can be created by two or more colours next to each other. The painter Mark Rothko once memorably described his abstract paintings as facades- ‘tragedy, ecstasy, doom and although my work is generally celebratory of life, it too is about creating the sublime.
My British artistic influences include Gillian Ayres, Barbara Rae, John Hoyland and notably Albert Irvin. Albert was very influential to me during me degree and his expressive use of colour and marks create paintings in multiple planes, that we, like he, wants the viewer to navigate through.
I hope that in viewing my paintings you are reminded of your mortality and the beauty that surrounds us. Whether I am painting the sea, sky or neon sign, I hope you get a moment of escapism that thrills you.
Paul Boyle studied at Glasgow School of Art from 1969-73. The following year he spent evenings at the original Glasgow Print Studio in order to gain printmaking experiences which could be used in his new teaching career. Techniques included photo silk screen, block printing, lithography and etching. Later he spent a summer in Orkney painting in watercolour. Photography had been a parallel interest since the age of 14, and Paul practiced to become technically proficient and well rounded. “Later I began to think about, and work towards, finding a common space for painting, printmaking and photography – a sharing of common aesthetic co-ordinates. In my teaching career I taught both chemical and digital photography as part of the Art & Design curriculum and explored innovative (for me) printmaking practices, working towards developing synergistic contacts between photography and other artistic disciplines.” Direct influences include Matisse, Picasso, Klee, Miro and Nicholson. Photographers include Hiroshi Sugimoto, Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Edward Weston and Walker Evans. Paul looks upon his creative practice as a form of printmaking and thinks almost entirely in terms of handling of visual elements, as opposed to the use of the camera as a recording tool. Since re-engaging with the Glasgow Print Studio some years ago Paul has been developing his Hullscapes theme.
The Development of the Hullscape Project: “From my own school art days I had developed the practice of describing subject matter using the language of the visual elements – lines, planes, colour, mood etc, as well as seeing it objectively in terms of given names – eg trees, sea. As a visually imaginative youngster I would randomly construct shapes, patterns and objects out of natural forms (such as faces in clouds) – the concept of pareidolia. In 2009 when I was wandering in a boatyard and flitting visually between these dualities of observation, I became aware of the presence of ‘Hullscapes’ in the surface colour and texture of the weathered hulls, some untouched since being lifted from the sea, others under repair and renovation. I use a single lens based image for each piece of work which is processed in Adobe LightRoom. Recently one of the Hullscapes was given a Facebook ‘like’ with the comment ‘Wabi-sabi’, a phrase which embodies a notion of traditional Japanese beauty and can infer quiet simplicity, quirks and anomalies in natural and constructed objects, beauty that comes with age and the visible evidence of maintenance and repair – an aesthetic appreciation of individuality and impermanence”.
Sonya Walters
Memories of distant travels and a response to experience much closer to home are the trigger to my work, but it is a fascination with colour which is the all encompassing ingredient to my practice.
The immediacy and physical nature of the printmaking process is a different experience to the more contemplative and solitary nature of the painting studio, but the two areas have become a significant overlapping combination.
During the process in both painting and printmaking, the work will begin to take its own path, and I’m always fascinated and pleased when on completion, the piece does indeed encapsulate the spirit of the initial response, but in a form never initially envisaged.
After graduating from Chelsea School of Art worked as an artist, teacher and banner maker in London and Cornwall.
Has exhibited widely over the years including Royal Academy of Arts, Affordable Art Fair, Tate St Ives, Camden Arts Centre, Newlyn Exchange and Truro Law Courts to name but a few.
She now works from her garden in Brighton studio in Brighton.
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