Hello, Subscriber First Name and welcome to my first newsletter! With a special discount to say thank you.

LIMITED WINTER LANDSCAPE SALE - early access and discount

On Wednesday 26th November, a carefully chosen collection of landscape paintings – including recent Plymouth, Devon and Cornwall pieces – will be released in a limited Winter Sale with special prices for my newsletter subscribers. As a thank you for signing up, you will have early access before the sale is announced anywhere else, giving you the first chance to collect a painting that has been painted on location and lived the weather with me.

You will receive an email on Wednesday 26th with the link to the sale page and the password to access it. Expect a mix of wide landscapes and some experimental pieces which have informed their creation, each painted en plein air.

Art sale pieces will return to their non-sale price when the page is opened for the general public on Friday 28th November. So grab a bargain!

THE SECRET LIVES OF PIGMENTS podcast

I have been working hard writing a number of podcast scripts all about the stories behind some of our most loved colours. Did you know that Prussian Blue was created in the laboratory of a manical scientist who inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein? And that the first truly green paints killed tens of thousands of people?

I’ll be launching THE SECRET LIVES OF PIGMENTS in the new year, and I’ll annouce that in a future newsletter.

DECEMBER PLANS

Alongside the The Secret lives of Pigments, I am planning to keep pushing my painting. I am especially interested in the reductive pieces, which is where I have moved, wiped and pulled the paint to reveal the canvas and create different effects within the painting. On a white, smooth canvas panel, this allows the paint to kind of stain the white, acting as a glaze which allows the light through and bounces back off the intesity of the pure white, making the colours glow. I am especially intested in using this technique to capture sunlight hitting the landscape.

I am currently attending the Newlyn School of Art on their professional landscape programme, and while I am finding attendance extremely hard because of my deafness and anxiety, I did have a wonderful session with Hugo Jones who advised me to push the mediums in which I work. So I will be using gouache to create a range of pieces, reacting quicker than I can with oil paints. Perhaps they might make the basis of my next sale collection!

Here you can see where this reductive technique is in action, enabling me to capture flowing water in a way which feels much more connected to the real thing.