The Self-Isolation Residency 20th may 2020: Day 52

#artistsupportpledge 'After the Rain', Acrylic on board, 19.5 x 19.5cm, £45.

I'm taking the opportunity to post another piece from my work selected for the #artistsupportpledge. Although I am still working on the drawing inspired by Italo Calvino's short story, 'The Distance of the Moon' I am at the same time working on a couple of other series of new works. One of my main reasons for transferring my practice to rural from city based studios was to give me the opportunity to work more with landscape and light again. Naturally the current social isolation rules do cause some potential problems  in this area, but not entirely so. I tend to travel a great deal under normal circumstances and whenever I do I tend to be armed with a variety of ways of making 'visual recordings' or studies if you prefer. Obviously I take photographs, I wouldn't be a human being living in the 21st century if I didn't, but I tend to spend most of my time making studies either in graphite, watercolour or, more and more so these days, acrylics. I find that taking a simple acrylics set with me when I travel allows me to make quick studies in quite expressive ways which dry a lot quicker and can feel more spontaneous than even watercolours. Over a number of years I have created quite a catalogue of these small studies, many of the are just 10 x 10 cm, they are used as inspiration for larger paintings when I return to the studio and so this time of enforced enclosure is a perfect time to bring some of these studies out for development. Many of the studies will be enlarged to be quite big oil paintings, but often on their way through this process they will become medium sized acrylic studies as I experiment with different aspects of them, 'After the Rain' (top) is one such image.

The study for this particular image (below) is based on one of the 'Five Sisters' a mountain range in Kintail in the North West highlands of Scotland. It is one of a large number of studies that I have produced of this subject and which were once again the inspiration for a complete series of oil paintings of the Five Sisters which I will also be adding to the #artistsupportpledge over the next couple of weeks. The piece I am including today is what could be called a development piece for a new painting of this scene in oils. I really wanted to increase the drama of the image with the head of the mountain appearing darker and even more brooding as it looms out of the low cloud left behind after the rain. Now that I have completed this process I am ready to consider working on the oil piece and so I am selling this acrylic version of 'After the Rain' with is just 19.5 x19.5 cm on board for £45 plus shipping.