12 Feb Thursday…catching up and inspiration

I’ve been out and about on the bike a lot recently and when the garden is in the process of slowly recovering and adapting to the cold, it’s good for me to get into the country to be inspired both for now and the months ahead…

Last Saturday I went for a ride and got completely absorbed with the thought of making a nest, so I collected a few ‘ingredients’ and combined with the atmosphere and the outdoors…I made a nest!

I loved putting it together and was constantly thinking of how birds only have their beaks to use, and how much better their nests are!

( my son put the egg in the nest…and I then painted it )

So, more bike rides this week have been motivating my mind to make more nests for my shed installation during the May Open House which will have a bird-ish theme this year.

I’ve also been madly prepping for the Valentine Workshop I’m running at West Elm in London this weekend ( this one’s booked up but there are places on my other workshops in March ), so a lot of moss and dogwood has been poking out of my rucksack as I’ve cycled home…

But I have also been very inspired by other artists this week…

Instagram is such a great place to get an artistic fix, but there are also a lot of images that are obviously, ( and sometimes a bit blatantly ), derivative of another artist’s work, and which seem to forget the connection to the original artist who has initially inspired them…

So I wanted to share a couple of other Instagrammers who have often directly inspired a development in my work, a slight change in direction or an integration of an idea…

Derek Jarman’s book ‘Chroma’ is another inspiration at the moment and is completely fascinating, and Ida Laerke on Instagram has definitely helped put a creative slant on my paintings this week…

I think it’s so important to acknowledge other artist’s work which has a direct effect on your own work; it’s good to honestly chart your personal artistic journey and guage what appeals to you at a particular moment in time…

So firstly, reading about what Derek Jarman says about white, basically made everything look blue on my frosty bike ride…

…and secondly, I adored Idalerke’s images of pressed flowers on her wall ( you can see it here on her IG account ); the abstraction of light and the juxtaposition of the hand-made flow of flowers just felt very right to me…

I’ve been focusing a lot on texture over the last few weeks and trying to combine nature with the rough and natural…( I have another Instagram account which is more like my visual, textural sketchbook…@outsidesense ), so Idalaerke’s images inspired a slightly different slant on this;

I placed some primroses from the garden onto one of my own paintings ( an area of the piece where the texture really stands out ) and I tried to create a natural flow alongside it…

So that is how the inspiration worked itself into my own image, but full credit has to go to Idalaerke for putting this idea into my head!

Two other lovely Instagrammers who have directly inspired me, particularly over the last 6 months, have been @julieskitchen and @omjsk…they are both lovely women and complete masters of their own artistry, and the combination of both their work has been a huge and constant inspiration to me which I readily acknowledge and massively appreciate…

And then today’s inspiration… came from a robin!