Mistakes in Painting

Hello!

I’m back on here with an update with some paintings which I’ve been working on, making mistakes with and more importantly, learning from! Since going freelance, I have the first half of the week to work on my paintings and The Orkney Cloth Company (more on that another time!) and the second half of the week I teach weaving. I’ve got a little more time to myself to get painting, which means I have to be very focused with what I want to get done. I wanted to keep this one short and sweet, with a quick update on some new work. I was going to include a little round of inspiration too, but thought that would be better saved for another post!

With the clocks going back, the days have been getting shorter, so I’ve had to squeeze as much painting time in as possible. My studio is very dark (despite being painted yellow!) with a single, low window. It makes painting in winter not so ideal, but it is so lovely to have a room of my own- true Virginia Woolf style!

You’ll notice a lot of my paintings are the same scene, but nuanced in different ways- a different coloured sky, or a change in the colour of the water. I use these little paintings as a place where I can develop my ideas, and more crucially make mistakes. Making mistakes in painting is probably the thing that lets me down the most, as I never use the mistakes, and instead I run away from it, avoiding mistakes all together and not painting for weeks on end, whilst the canvas which I prepared over several weeks sits in the corner, forgotten about. But I’ve found that really, mistakes are where things start to happen- what if I moved that murky green which I hate and and put it up there? What happens if I cut the composition down? What if I wipe a section out? What then? All of these different questions have given me different answers, and I’m just trying, testing, playing them out to see what happens.

Being less precious about the end result might just mean I make something that I’ll be proud of, with a process I can learn from.