A week ago, I started on a training programme of advanced oils and cold wax medium, with a Norfolk based artist called Sally Hirst. My aim was to learn more about my own work and see if there were any commonalities in my compositions. As I generally work in an intuitive way, without any visual reference point initially, my ideas and creative inspirations can become limited, especially now that Covid 19, has robbed us of the freedom to explore new places. 

As students of this training programme we were asked to set ourselves a project to work on during the course of the month long training. I am calling mine - ‘Opening Up and Paring Back’.

I wanted to look more closely at four of my own works and use vignettes from the works to dissect and recreate. I am not sure what the outcome will be, or even if it will be useful, but it will be a learning experience.

Above are 8 images that will form the basis of the project. They were in colour initially, but with the help of a Notanizer, I have made them into black and white images - light and dark.

Notan is a Japanese term which literally means “light dark harmony”. Artists use ”notan studies” to explore different arrangements of light and dark elements in a painting, without having the distraction of other elements like colour, texture and finer details. (This section taken from the Paint and Drawing Academy).