Finding inspiration

I’ve had a busy couple of months with little time for creativity. This coincided with feeling a bit underwhelmed in relation to my artistic output and the need to find some new inspiration for my work. A wee holiday was in order and in mid June I headed for the Low Countries and spent around ten days exploring the galleries and museums of Lille, Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp. From this I not only gained a renewed appreciation for the work of the old masters but found other artists to admire and learn from.

I would say that, to date, my main source of inspiration was Impressionism but I have been drawn toward Expressionism for some time now and more recently have begun to experiment with different techniques and media, moving away, gradually, from realism.

I have started to take longer over the preparatory stages of a piece, experimenting with different compositions before executing the finished work. The starting point, as seen below, may be a sketch, or a photograph or a reworking of an older painting

For my latest piece the starting point was a pencil sketch of a view from the window in my holiday apartment in Newtonmor, earlier this year. The process I went through to arrive at the final piece can be seen in the gallery below.