Painting from my imagination

In my design career I often have to start with a blank piece of paper, designing things from scratch that do not yet exist. I have always enjoyed and been lucky to be able to visualise such things in my mind, using my 3D way of thinking before drawing them up.

In my art world, although I have often sketched from life and used this material as reference for my finished pieces, I have often used play and process, with interpretation, as an equally important part of what I produce, responding as I go with the artwork in progress.

During the Covid pandemic I have been adding more colour to my work and I have found myself gradually returning to a past passion of painting, especially oil on canvas and linen, with the emphasis much more on my imagination. The joy for me here is that unlike design, where it is all about compromise in trying to interpret what clients, interior decorators, Listed Buildings and local authorities largely want, I can just paint a building, a subject and a scene to suit myself.

It is so liberating.

As a teenager, I often drew pictures at school from imagination, so it feels like a return to a more natural pathway for me.

I love the suggestion of a story for the viewers to decide for themselves what they feel it is about and to interact with the artwork. It is rather like creating a “Hitchcock” type mystery.

Although I do produce some preliminary sketches for composition, scale and the subject matter, I largely respond to the artwork as I go, like a dialogue, so that it has a chance to grow and to take on a life all of its own. For me, the joy of oil paint slowing me down is that it allows me to review and develop ideas before the next stage or layer. I often imagine that I am present within the actual picture.

Too often in the modern world things are rushed. Especially in the design world that I come from. I find it is more possible for me to be creative with a slower and more natural pace which oil painting allows.

Throughout the process, I try to respect the character of the medium.

‘The House in the Woods’ painting above was the first of my artworks employing this new, slower, more imaginative approach.

This picture was largely inspired from my time of walking through long bracken in the woods on the common in Tunbridge Wells many years ago and memories jogged by an old sketch. The Victorian house, background trees and ferns are all from imagination. I would make mental notes of roof tiles, hedges and trees on my daily walks around where I now live with my dog.

I wanted the picture to have an eeriness about it and to enable people to imagine their own stories from it. I was visualising the scene in my head as I painted it and it developed its own character, as I took time out to reflect on it as the paint was drying.

For me, as the house is beyond a fence and hedge, it helps to create intrigue and something just being out of reach or out of bounds, as if there could be something sinister going on inside.

‘The Gate House’ above is my most recent oil painting from imagination.

The image for this painting largely came from a dream that I had when I was feverish after my second Covid 19 vaccine. I imagined that I was walking in it, in a painterly form.

The gate house was largely influenced by my classical design background and is from my imagination. The old red van was very much of an era of cars that I have always liked, when they all had more character and shape to them. It was setting the picture into the past. It also added a strong complimentary colour to the greenery, pushing it into the foreground to create more depth to the picture. Again, it helps to add intrigue; almost like something out of Poirot or Hitchcock. To help balance the picture and to add a bit of subversion to it, I included a couple of traffic cones, which do at times feature in my other art work. It helps to create humour in my work.

I was wrestling a bit when it came to painting the foliage on the trellis to the right of the picture but during a conversation with my friend Lesley, a clipped topiary bird was suggested and it clicked with me. It is exactly what one would expect with a house and garden like this. I sketched it out before painting it, as I had done with the van.

Like ‘The House in the Woods’, the gate that I designed and the hedge helped to create a barrier and intrigue for what might be happening beyond them.

I am now starting on my next oil painting from imagination…