This year I’m trying out a few shows and markets that are new to me. As I write, my new paintings are being framed, the above being a grey heron.
You can find me at the rather exciting Frome Cheese Show on the 13th September. A brilliant family day out, massive agricultural show with all the usual highlights plus stacks of award winning cheese! And me of course, in the craft marquee.
After that I’ll be in Marlborogh Town Hall on November 1st and 22nd, and December 13th.
In between these shows you’ll find me in my shop and studio, making new work. Probably wrapped up to such an extent as to be wholly unrecognisable as the seasons progress.
So….. I’m scared; of lots of things, spiders, dying alone, American politicians… you get the gist. But I notice in conversations with the people who come into the gallery, just how many people would love to be able to draw but are convinced they can’t or are too scared to try. What’s the worst that can happen?
I have seen the worst and experienced it myself in the form of breaking down and dissolving into tears, flouncing out of the class, (not me!) fits of anger or plain old beating myself up for being rubbish. It’s ugly to watch and experience but if you really want to learn, you come back for more and do battle with you crushed ego time after time. I’m sure there are people doing art degrees or on creative courses all over the world battering themselves senseless for not being better at drawing. Of course, not everyone experiences drawing this way. I do and I think it takes enormous courage to learn and practice a new skill if you feel this way.
What stops us is fear. We are frightened of the painful feelings of not being good enough. We become vulnerable when we sit down to draw. Making art is a risk we take and I experience it as a mirror. If you don’t feel great about yourself to begin with it’s going to be tough ride. It’s as if drawing was designed to trigger these very emotions connected to self worth. I can’t think of any activity which triggers it better.
So I’m thinking about this and wondering what it would have been like to have had a class where my vulnerability and potential for fear, shame, self doubt and deep frustration had a place and some acknowledgment in the classroom.
All that sounds quite woolly knickered cod psychology and maybe it is. It doesn’t matter as long as we find a way to step over the fear and do the thing in front of us.
So that’s what I hope to offer; a way to step over the fear or make it welcome, so that we can make marks, learn some new skills and walk away with our egos intact.
It’s just 2.5 hours on a Sunday morning and if this first session goes well, perhaps there will be more.
Not what you would expect? Well me neither! Those of you who know me and my work may be surprised at how I am producing such different paintings all of a sudden.
The truth is that they are not really new. I began making these “scrapey” paintings in my first year of my degree in 2010. Inspired by the work of Gerhard Richter, I began making marks on an old door with copious amounts of acrylic paint, making an awful mess in the process. The idea was not to recreate a Richter but to examine the seemingly distant idea of self portraits. (This was my focus in my first year.) I had made many such literal paintings and drawings to this end. The invariable result was an approximation of me with a furrowed, stern expression born of furious concentration, trying to capture my own likeness from the mirror.
Me in oil pastel. 2010
Thankfully I moved on to the idea of gestural mark making as a form of self portrait. A creation of a record of our movement, or a choice of colour depicting a decision as a kind of portrait. Different from the representation of our faces and more akin to the sometimes deeply emotional resonance contained in an object or piece of clothing that was well used by a now departed loved one.
I’m my case, a flat, red pencil my Dad used in the course of his day to day work as a joiner. I painted this pencil many times and it became a stand in for my Dads likeness that somehow says much more than a standard portrait. It helped me process my grief.
The accompanying blue, rusty plate became a stand in for me as this found object was very much part of my second year work. I made two 5ft square paintings, one of the back and one of the front and fixed them together, hanging in space for my first year show.
Dad was cremated wearing his blue overalls with many pencils in the pockets.
These two paintings made in 2013 are hanging at home, reminding me of my Dad and our connection.
In any case, self portrait was a passing idea and it did lead in some interesting directions.
So now, I have come back to the joyful process of making these abstract paintings. I’m not thinking about them as self portraits or having any other deeper meaning than paint on a surface. They are the antithesis of my observational wildlife drawings but I’m told by one tiny and clever, elderly lady that there is nature in the new work too. I hope that is the case. But, like Richter, I hope not to be put in a box as far the work I produce. All I know is that they bring me joy and that is the best reason to make anything!
I have five more blank primed boards ready to join these finished paintings so I’d better stop writing and start painting.
At the time of writing these are for sale in my gallery in Bradford on Avon. Contact me if you’re interested.
Jonny was an influential person in my youth. The father of two friends from school, he was a colourful and unique dad. He loved to paint and write poetry and went to every gig his son and daughter played. (They’re still musicians.)His paintings were all over the family home and he had an amazing record collection. He made nettle tea for us and taught me to smoke a pipe. So many stories, scrapes and adventures. Much loved, he passed away during lockdown.
This is the beginning, an under painting in Indian Red of Jonny in a typical pose for him. He loved to take photos and be photographed and documented life in that way.
Sara is a friend, mother , teacher, wife and maker of beautiful socks. Her husband commissioned me to paint her portrait as a gift. Brave man. Thankfully it worked out fine and she likes it. The image I worked from was meant to be for a passport photo . The landscape is imagined but has a Wiltshire flavour. I like the honesty of the expression, there’s no artifice.
I love the challenge of a portrait. It’s what I began my journey into art with. No one told me it was supposed to be difficult so I had ignorance and naivety on my side. I became a little obsessed and couldn’t look at a face without imagining in detail how I would render it in paint. Disconcerting for the person who’s face I was scrutinising no doubt, but it made me aware of the process of learning to look and see that I was undergoing. More marked perhaps in the case of portrait painting as there is a part of the brain dedicated to facial recognition. Apparently in portrait painters this brain area is larger, presumably made so by the act of painting faces.
Every now and then I get a commission, sometimes a portrait of a pet or person but never before such an extraordinary bird as the great bustard. If you’re not familiar; and why should you be, they’ve been extinct in the uk since 1832, these charismatic birds are to be found on Salisbury Plain where there is a breeding and conservation project dedicated to rebuilding a strong population for reintroduction.
I live in Wiltshire with Salisbury Plain on the doorstep so upon agreeing to the commission I felt it was only fitting to go and visit the great bustard project. Anyone can visit via booking online. Meeting our very knowledgeable, intrepid and well travelled guid in a car park, only a slightly clandestine experience , you’ll be transferred into a land rover and driven through restricted areas of MOD land and farmland, in pursuit of these not so elusive birds. They’re too big to hide. Furnished with binoculars and telescope we bounced happily around the tracks until we spotted our quarry in the distance. The males and females stay in separate groups and we had planned our visit coincide with mating season. The females looked very relaxed, busy feeding and preening, occasionally raising their heads to check out the male group and casting their disdainful eye they would then return to foraging. Males were taking it in turns to put on a magnificent display in the hope of attracting a mate. They have an inflatable pouch on the breast which shows flashes of bright blue flesh and the most extraordinary moustache which, when the pouch is inflated turns upwards giving them a comical sergeant major kind of expression. Their wings, in the meantime look as if they have been turned inside out and then the whole affair is gently vibrated to finish the effect. You couldn’t make it up and my overall impression was of how unlikely this amazing bird is.
These are ground nesting birds which leave them and their eggs quite vulnerable to predators. They have three forward facing toes and none facing back so they cannot perch in trees. They are the heaviest flying birds in the world and their wingspan reaches up to 8 feet. Female birds have a protected enclosure where they can nest naturally in safety. The first of their eggs is taken to be incubated in safety and the second egg is left for them to hatch on their own. The males only contribution to the next generation is his fancy pants dance and deeply impressive if somewhat comical plumage. (Yet again the next generations genes are decided by the aesthetic choices of the female. ) He plays no further role in the rearing of the chicks.
The painting took a few months to complete and I had to build up some courage to make a start. All those feathers felt quite daunting. I worked from a photo by taken by Steve Colwill who works for the project and kindly sent me some images of their birds. My plan is to give the digital image of the painting to the great bustard group to use for raising funds for the project.
I have Karen Miller to thank for this image of a mountain hare. She was out on the mountain in the snow with her camera, and I was in the relative (mostly not that relative) warmth of my studio with paper and pastels. Karen has inspired me. She has captured some wonderful and characterful shots of mountain hares and other wildlife and I will be attempting to do some of them justice, with her gracious permission. I have been moved to learn more about these secretive yet ubiquitously depicted creatures. Most people who come to my studio mistake them for “bunnies”. I guess you could be forgiven if you have never seen a hare, but they are a very different beastie indeed. Their physiology for a start; much larger and more powerful as you would expect, but a thing like their nasal cavity has evolved quite differently to that of a rabbit in order to accommodate the volume of air needed to fuel their flight and gymnastics; the way their heart is anchored extra securely to their skeleton in order not to be dislodged in sharp turns and tumbles while racing from predators (or suitors). The leverets are borne fully formed with eyes open. They live entirely above ground and do not make a burrow. They are among a very small group of animals that have the ability to conceive while in the last stage of pregnancy, thought to be an adaptation to shorten the time between litters. We live in an age where raising grouse to shoot commercially takes precedence over mountain hares and many are killed so that grouse hunting can remain lucrative. Not in some far off place, but in Scotland. Maybe the more we learn about an animal, an ecosystem, our planet, the safer it becomes because hopefully with knowledge comes respect. Thats how it works for me anyway.
This is a 30 x 30 cm drawing I did a couple of years ago as one of a pair of commissions from Jenny herself. She is an extraordinary woman in her eighties now, and she wanted something for her family to remember her by. The drawing is from a strongly lit black and white photo of her in her early twenties looking quite pensive and uncertain. I don’t often do portraits but this image was sufficiently odd and engaging and Jenny is such a fun and engaging character that I could not refuse.
This is one of my latest drawings of what I can only assume is an oak, in a delightful field in Great Chalfield. It stands as part of an avenue of sturdy mature oaks that punctuate the grass in a strait line from one gate to the next. It’s a 25 minuet walk from my home. I discovered it in high summer when the air was full of insects and the cool shade of the trees made a dappled, fairy tail tunnel into another world. I went back in late Autumn to catch the trees without their clothes on. A Tree Creeper, seemingly oblivious to me was industriously hunting the crevices for a meal. On another walk there, just before the gate to the field, I came face to face with a muntjac deer crossing the road, he and I both pedestrians for a moment, both heading into different fields. Other walks in that direction have resulted in encounters with a young grass snake, a beautiful brown hare and a kingfisher. All practically on my door step and there for all to see if you know how to look.
This fellow is on the cover of the brochure for this years Cloth Road Art Trail. The Corner Gallery where I make and sell my work is participating from the 5th to the 13th of May. We hope to get lots of visitors through the door and it’s a great opportunity to see and purchase fresh work made especially for the event. There are three artists at two venues down at the Tithe Barn Workshops so it really is worth a visit if you find yourself on the Art Trail.
Jacqueline Byrne Art 