CREATIVE GROWTH | VISUAL ART | NEW WRITERS
Cross Pollination: Making Your Mark
Mark making with new media and experimentation can grow your art or photography practice but abstraction in art and creative growth both need patience.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last year trying to understand how different strands of work and different media might relate to each other, and if indeed my efforts take me forward. Yet. I add that as a reminder to myself to be patient.
“Patience is not the ability to wait, but the ability to keep a good attitude while waiting.” Joyce Meyer
A friend’s course in abstract acrylics during the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020 saw me pick up a paintbrush for the first time in over 30 years. I soon found that I preferred improvised tools for mark making that placed a limit on the extent of my ability to preconceive and control the outcome. For someone whose career and personality have been marked by self-control and an attention to detail that probably speaks volumes…
Early on I reached the point of wondering if I really ought to just stick to photography and pack away my paints. A pre- and post- house move break amounting to six months meant that I had lost whatever momentum I had been developing. In the end I didn’t put my toy box away; a small chink of light appeared that encouraged me to stick with it.
Another glimmer appeared as I reviewed some of my paint studies alongside photographic prints and glimpsed what I felt were interesting pairings. I began to see parallels between what subjects and compositions draw me here in my new environment and what had gone before.
Water is still very much a part of it, but I can now see that certain patterns and complexities speak to me in other subject matter. They seem to hold echoes of the mark making of sunlight on water that I had been exploring on the River Dove.
A term I loosely used in an online conversation with a friend came back to me and seemed to fit my attempts to pair up my two media so that they feed each other, and perhaps at some point integrate. So here is paint and print pair Cross Pollination №1. I’m increasingly confident that there will be more.
If you’d like to see what I make you’ll find examples on my website. There’s a lot of new work – both photography and mixed media – waiting in the wings so if you’d like to be first to see it consider subscribing to my newsletter.
My art is about place and nature, and my practice including writing is shaped by water. I have previously described the river as being my conduit: it has sharpened my vision, given me permission to experiment and continues to introduce me to new ways of seeing.
It seems only fair to mention that my friend, artist Lin Cheung, has further developed her art course Directions in Abstraction and you can find details here.
I should also thank photographer Deborah Hughes for saying that she viewed her other artwork as cross-training, which prompted me to say that I’d thought of mine as cross-pollination and prompted me to write this article.
