This photograph was taken on the SW Coastal Path, somewhere between Gurnard’s Head and Pendeen Watch – the lighthouse can just be seen in the distance. It was March of this year, so no colour from the coastal flowers but the sea is a beautiful clear blue, the sky almost matching. I’ve included this view as last week I went on another of Vinny Stapley’s workshops, Layered Landscape, and selected a picture from this section of the walk as my inspiration. My source was a very old calendar picture by an artist called Rex Preston which I have kept tucked away for years.
I thoroughly enjoyed the workshop, loved the screen printed technique we used for our backgrounds and was very inspired to think about doing more landscapes in the future. The piece I began in the workshop hasn’t been very successful and as such I haven’t wanted to spend a lot of time on it – more work might help, but it’s going in my box of UFOs. I can’t even get excited about chopping it up, which is what I often do if I’m unhappy with a piece. It’s too ‘literal’ when really I wanted something that was more abstract, or at least, less like the original picture!
I’ve posted this to show that not every project turns out really well and that sometimes a workshop is really valuable because it shows you what you need to do next time, on your second or maybe third attempts. Watching other students on the class can be useful too, enjoying their colour combinations or taking inspiration from their design sources. On this particular workshop I felt really keen to try screen printing, something I’ve never been inspired to do before and even thought that monoprinting a landscape background would be something worth trying before investing in a screen.
JOLLIETEXTILES 