7000th Painting - ZOE TAYLOR'S "Bluster"

 This is the 7000th painting we have offered  in the Gallery and on line. 

Zoe is one of our most popular artists with our visitors and lives locally. 

This is what she says about her work-

 

"You know those very ‘British’ days we get here? Those days where the clouds scud across the sky and you decide to take a walk and a look at the view? Those days when that patch of blue disappears and all of a sudden you know that you are going to get rain splattered very soon - well that’s the sort of day and 'BLUSTER 'is the description of that wind that carries the rain right at you !

I work in a sketchbook when I’m out and about and that sketchbook feeds my studio work. The pages these days are dirty and splodgy and inky and black and an impression of the place rather than directly representational. I record that wind, rain and light in scratches and muddy splashes across my paintings - trying to capture that energy that you feel out in the wind and the rain.

I also have scenes in my head, as if by osmosis by being in the landscape, and once I start a painting then the sketch and the memory seem to come together and so the process moves along and drifts from the original inspiration. This is why most of my paintings rarely have a place name attached to them, they are as much about the elements as the place.

Bluster started life as a sketch usually work with acrylics on heavyweight watercolour paper. You have to work fast with acrylics so I find that the energy has to be there right from the beginning - if you want to mark the paint in any way, it has to be done whilst that paint is still wet enough to take the mark. Paper sucks the moisture away from the pigment and I just love the feel of the paint across the paper.

My work is still maturing but I feel that it has a long way to go. I’m looking forward to some time in Cornwall in October and hope to do some more direct work outside in the field, working directly to a finished piece, rather than into a sketchbook, to give a more immediate response.h from quite a few years ago and evolved as I worked."

 

Zoe's paintings hanging in Bevere Gallery