Joy Moore Landscapes

February  2021 Beautiful Ink 

February has been a busy - and very cold month in the studio. But my husband and his blacksmith friend are building me a "stufa ad accumulo" which is a tall wood burning stove that will keep me lot warmer than the two expensive and not very efficient radiators I rely on at the moment!

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I have been developing my more abstract/expressive landscapes but I have to say I am making slow progress. I almost always work in a series and have 6 landscape paintings on the go, but I fell into the trap of focusing too much on just one - trying to make it work and have not so far succeeded. Luckily I am following Louise Fletcher's studio sessions on her Art Tribe Facebook page and this month she is has been doing some loosening up work with inks. So I put the landscapes aside and followed Louise's advice. I was just planning  to start experimenting  when I happened to be at the fish stall in a local market and was taken by the lovely shapes of the shell fish and molluscs so I took some photos and used them as a starting point - using black and sepia ink with gesso and some charcoal and graphite. The images here are some of the results. I loved exploring the quality of the inks and gesso - splashing, scraping and rolling (using a printing roller). 

This week has been really busy - I have been following 2 taster online courses with Nicholas Wilton and Gabriel Lipper. Both really useful - particularly to bring you back to the key functions of design, tone and colour  which can get forgotten (certainly by me). I thought I had finished a couple of the landscape paintings but thinking about contrasting tonal values - very much emphasised on both the courses, i made black and white photos of them and can see immediately that they need to be tweaked - so that's my job when I get back in the studio tomorrow.

January 2021