Our Newsletter: Issue #45
Hello, and welcome to another issue of Our Newsletter.
I hope you're doing well and are able to keep finding small joys in the every day despite the news and current events.
As promised in our last newsletter, which revealed my painting Slice of Summer, today I'll be sharing with you some more on this piece.
Earlier this year, I started writing about each painting I finish in a stream of consciousness. This is a practice I should've probably started years ago, I'm sure, but having now just read over what I wrote, I can see how valuable of a practice this was and will be for future paintings.
Here's the first paragraph I wrote upon finishing the painting:
This painting is an exercise in wanderlust, a space in which to get lost in the same way I would when gazing at the sea, inhaling the saline air and feeling the warm gentle breeze caress my skin and breathe through my hair. It’s about enjoying nature and about remembering places that are special through snippets of memories. It’s calm. It’s open. It’s optimistic. It’s… summer.
Slice of Summer, 2023
Oil on canvas
100x70cm
Photographed by Stephen Chatterton with Nikon camera
Based off two photos I took in Ibiza last summer (2022), this painting started as a thank you to the person hosting me in their home. I wanted to make something that does justice to the beauty and serenity of the place.
Compositionally, and you my have noticed this from recent paintings, I've been interested in breaking the canvas up into sections. This started out of an enquiry into both colour and composition back in 2020.
Colour because it's subjective - everyone perceives colour differently both physically and culturally, its symbolism varying across cultures. Also because colour is able to shift/guide/affect moods.
Composition because working in 'panels' as I was calling them at the time, offered an opportunity to play with concepts of collage, abstraction and storytelling, while from a painting perspective this process allowed for experimenting with details & texture vs. flatness.
Over time I've changed how I refer to these 'panels' and have started calling them 'windows' and 'portals' instead (more on the latter another time).
As such, Slice of Summer is made up of two 'windows' depicting detailed sea/landscape. They're separate, their placement equidistant to the sides creating visual harmony, yet the slightly out of focus backdrop of the sea meeting the sky contextualises them, bringing them together. These 'windows' therefore offer the opportunity to peer into just a snippet of a place in more detail.
Slice of Summer, 'window' details.
Photographed on my phone, while the paint was still wet. Still can't quite grasp the difference in colour saturation between these photos taken on a phone and the photo above taken with a proper camera. None of the photos have been edited.
Throughout the process of painting I kept coming back to thinking about landscape and how we connect with it. How people leave their mark on landscape and how landscape leaves a mark on the person. How we travel to the sea, mountains, lakes, forests, deserts... in an effort to be closer to the healing entity of nature.
This thought process has sparked in me a curiosity to explore this idea further and as such I want to turn this into a series of paintings exploring different places that hold special significance. I want to do this slowly, mindfully, and I've already got a list of at least another 7 places I want to spend more time experiencing in this way.
Compositionally I think these next paintings will most likely mirror Slice of Summer, but who knows, perhaps each place must be depicted in its own way.
Either way, I look forward to exploring this further and wonder how each place I'm thinking of depicting in this way will transform through the process of painting.
Some work in progress photos - first pic shows this piece at the beginning when I decided to paint the whole canvas this bright orange as I knew that the final result would be predominantly blue and I wanted to experiment with working on a complementary colour. I really enjoyed doing this actually, though I learnt (the hard way) that I need to remember to check how long certain pigments take to dry. To make this orange I used a yellow lake (and in high quantities too), without thinning it out with much solvent because I wanted the colour to be bright bright, which resulted in just this one layer of paint taking a month, if not more, to fully dry!
So there you have it, the how, why and what of Slice of Summer. As ever feel free to share your thoughts by replying directly to this email.
Catch you again in a couple of weeks.
Wishing you a great weekend ahead.
Lots of love,
Arietta xx