A lot of the upcoming river posts are actually just to get my best images into the galleries above, I’ve not got much to say about them, apart from they are an improvement from my previous pieces, and are mostly technical exercises from when the only local subject was the river during lockdown. I can see they are good but I struggle to separate my sheer dislike of this subject due to exhaustion. It is a bit like when I was small and ate a whole box of After Eight mints in one go one Christmas Day – then my favourite chocolates – and have never really liked them much since. I think sadly a byproduct of the lockdown is that it gave me an severe aversion to painting rivers…
Maybe time will heal this, and it feels like slagging off my own children for something that isn’t their fault, so I won’t. I do like the sky in ‘Duet #1’ though and think my control of the greenery and clouds shows I can do this, however I struggle with spreading/water control sometimes. But it’s telling I haven’t posted that to Instagram yet, despite it being well over 6 weeks old.
I got a good reaction to the bridge image above which I might make prints from but it feels very much not me, If that makes sense? Even when I finished it I was ‘nope, that’s not who I am’ despite it being a good image. Feels like I am taking someone else’s style for a walk, rather than developing my own. Fun, but also rather schizophrenic.
There are elements of me in there, but they are buried by something else. I do like the use of white space, and the loose drawing, and I didn’t overwork the sky and watercolour so that’s good.
But I really want to develop my own voice.
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