linda severn

Autumn isn't all grey.

2011-11-17T12:14:00.002+01:00

This fantastic leaf had landed on my patio this morning. Mother nature just pops these things out like cheery notes to brighten up the grey. I did tweak it a little bit with my brush app but only a bit - just the spots! Looking at it through a layer of something else, paradoxically, makes it more noticeable.

More work, please Linda!

2010-02-03T11:05:00.006+01:00

Last blog post beginning of November! How disgraceful! I have a problem with blogs and that is that they all too often are so mundane, even some of the more creative ones. Still as a spur to getting on with more work it is, for me, very useful to make a few notes and actually get my head away from kids, homework, household chores...

Lady Philosophy (last blog) is still progressing and turning out alright with nice bright , clear, transparent colours. Although abstract painting, for me, is intellectually stimulating, I'm increasingly drawn towards images of people, not portraits as such but characters.

Here is a guy I saw in a cafe some time ago, eating his breakfast. I drew him in felt pen and scanned the basic drawing into the computer. I then did an abstract collage, scanned that in and used the two together (in Photoshop) to make the image as it is here.

Lady Philosophy

2009-11-01T12:28:00.001+01:00

An idea has been going around in my head for some time now; ever since I heard an edition of Melvin Bragg's In our Time way back at the beginning of the year. It was about Boethius, a Roman general in 5A.D., who was sentenced to death and whilst in prison wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. The grey eyed lady (Athene) appears to him, and discusses the transitory nature of riches and fame-(Wheel of Fortune).
I wanted to paint something quite simple to reflect my thoughts on these philosophical subjects. So pictured here is a watercolour sketch to work out the order of the glazes as they'll appear in the finished oil. I have modified it slightly, and maybe more changes will happen along the way- as they do.
Well this is all very serious and high brow- I'm off to do a fun Christmas card...

More work in Progress

2009-10-06T12:47:00.000+02:00

Very excited this morning as I have two more works in progress. So three projects on the notice board and all were conceived during my Summer trip to London.

These two will be just over a metre square, in gloss household paint on board.
The work featured in the previous blog, I am now thinking, might be some kind of construction.

New work

2009-10-02T12:12:00.009+02:00

Starting work on a new painting. The idea has been hovering around since my visit to London back in July. The sketch above a sort of first impression, but the final work, I hope, I envisage, will not look anything like this. I want to simplify- to find an essence.

After a fantastic day, first in Tate Modern and then Tate Britain I walked East along The Embankment (North Side) between five and six in the afternoon. It was a pleasant Summer's day, sunny with a few cotton wool clouds and a breeze. The foliage on the majestically mature trees of the Capital, overhanging the river wall in places, creating a protective tunnel from the race home only yards away across the lawns on my left.

Before I reached The Houses of Parliament I walked through a little park with a monument to some notable person of the past. It is this snippet of time that I want to capture in a painting.

The white, upright statue; solid and enduring. The circular movement of the summer breeze and the pigeons. The formal planting of the colourful flowerbeds, and fashionable use of semi-tropical plants.

Normally I need a physical starting point for a painting. Something that I can draw and then explore. This will be a challenge for me because it is abstract from the very start. Nothing about this is tangible. It is about a moment in time. The feelings that occurred during that time frame, colours, sounds, spacial movement.

Saatchi Online Showdown Competition

2009-07-13T15:53:00.009+02:00

As mentioned in my previous post, producing anything very much through the Summer months is quite difficult; so I'm taking the opportunity to work around this and get other things going.

I've uploaded several paintings to the Saatchi Online Website, and I thought I'd try my luck in their continuously running competition called Showdown. Over a thousand paintings are voted on and systematically whittled down until there are only two left. These two then go into a head to head competition in the final week. The winner receives one thousand pounds, but best of all, they put the winning painting in their gallery.

This is the painting I've entered for the competetion.

If you'd like to go over and take a look, follow this link:

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/showdown/index.php?showpic=222276

Summer

2009-07-06T12:19:00.011+02:00

Summer has well and truly arrived here in Southern Spain. It is the Season I find the most difficult. For me every other season has its wonders. I adore Autumn, not, I think, a time of death and dying, rather the time of year when things are set in motion for the next cycle. Juicy berries preceed the setting of seeds, and then there are the glorious rich colours. Winter, I love it; embryonic life snuggled up and just waiting for the warmer weather to arrive. Spring? Smashing, everything exploding, bursting forth. Summer? Far too hot. Flowers shrivelled. Earth baked to a crust of iron. Brains addled by the glaring sun. Holiday makers' seared flesh. Ugh, no thanks. On top of all that, work becomes almost impossible for an inordinately long eleven weeks whilst the children are off from school, and anyway, most of the time, with temperatures in the mid thirties and plus most people only feel fit to lie down either in a darkened room or in the baking hot sun, depending on their disposition.

How can I best tackle all of this? Well, I'm probably not going to get much painting done; so I'll concentrate on photos and drawing. So from time to time through the Summer I'll try to post some scribbles of characters doing what they do in Summer.

Inspiration

2009-06-09T16:14:00.018+02:00

There is a group of three plants just outside my kitchen door, on top of the shoe cupboard. They take quite a hammering from wind and sun and my neglect when I forget to water them, but they forgive me because they are succulents. Their turgid forms simple and strong.

I have walked past them hundreds of times and thought, "I really must do something about those plants", that is to say, to paint or draw them, get them down on paper, or card, or canvas, or photograph them - anything to reproduce and reinvent them. There is just something about the interplay of shapes, texture and colour. They inspire me.

To be be inspired to create a work of art, be it visual, literary or musical is, I think, a very basic need in many of us. I know that if I haven't been able to do enough work I can sink into a very depressive mood because to create is the very essence of life. I remember listening to a talk at BBC Radio Three's Free Thinking Festival; I believe it was Bill Drummond and he was talking about music, he said, "Art, like religion, exists to give life meaning".

I couldn't agree more.

Drawing the Line

2009-05-19T17:18:00.005+02:00

Meemed by Natalie

2009-05-14T10:36:00.014+02:00

What a strange word 'meme' is. What are its origens?

Anyway, Natalie d'Arbeloff has done it to me in her Blaugustine's Other Blog and I'm very honoured that she should use one of her seven notable sites (from her huge blogroll) to mention my embryonic one. Thank you, Natalie.

Now in turn I have to list my seven favourite things and my seven favourite blogs. Many of the blogs I like are also on Natalie's blogroll, since that is where I found them in the first place. My seven favourite things, at the moment, are:

Listening to my son play the piano
Picking a lemon fresh from the tree
Walking in the garden and smelling any fragrant herbs
Hearing my cats pur
Eating avocado and crusty brown bread
Watching rainbows chase around the room from the crystal in the window
Reading 'Pied Beauty' by Gerard Manley Hopkins

And my seven favourite blogs:

http://movingpoems.com/
http://www.marja-leena-rathje.info/main.php
http://www.nancycampbelle.blogspot.com/
http://kimmi.wordpress.com/category/bug-pics/

http://chatoyance.blogspot.com/
http://tumbleword.blogspot.com/

2009-05-13T22:31:00.003+02:00

A haiku about my art.

Abstract arrangement
negative positive space
shape line tone balance.

Dar a luz

2009-05-09T20:44:00.000+02:00

This is my first blog. It feels like such a big deal; I've been meaning to get around to it for, I think, about a year. My heading means 'to give birth' but it can also mean 'to produce', in Spanish. The idea is that it will be a sort creative diary; by taking and making notes of ideas in a blog it will be where the germs of creativity begin to have a concrete form. That by writing, taking photos and making drawings and paintings and publishing them at regular intervals I can get back into working on a more serious and regular basis. In this blog I can collect a few ideas together and start to get them to grow.

Where I live, here in Southern Spain, the wild flowers of Spring are now going to seed. Over the last six to eight weeks we have seen an abundance of floral colour, the very wet winter has helped. This afternoon I took my son and a carrier bag down the hill and we collected as many seeds as we could. On our return we shook them all out in a wild corner of our garden. I'm hoping that next Spring we'll have poppies of red and yellow, wild oats, (I think they are wild oats if not I hope someone will correct me) and something else that is a beautiful purple colour, I have no idea of its name. The wild oats are exquisite. They seem to me to have an oriental quality, a very simple beauty.

I took several photos of the oats, the one above, took with a very slow shutter speed, bleached out the detail of the plant itself and left the exquisitely simple curves highlighted against the dark wood of my sideboard, almost giving an appearance of an inlay.

I will head off now for my studio and see where this photo can take me...