ARTIST OF THE WEEK CLAIRE KINSEY

This week the artist of the week is Devon based artist Claire Kinsey “Your bold, abstract work ‘The Bay/Shelter Devon’ shows a real appreciation of colour.  Can you tell us more about the importance of colour both to you and your practice? “

For me colour is everything in my work, colours have to work together and sometimes I change them three or four times until I’m happy with the result. It’s just a gut feeling, I know when it’s not right sometimes it just happens and others it takes many changes to get the feel I really want. I am constantly trying to achieve the luminosity that stained glass gives but know that that will never happen when working with paint and canvas, but it’s a goal I strive for having been so inspired at a young age by church and cathedral windows. This is the reason I change the colours of objects and views to more vibrant and intense ones. Colour also creates curiosity, if a painting instantly grabs your attention you want to see more of it, look at it closely. I find it’s the same in nature, colour draws you in then you see more and discover something new. Even a cloudy sky is full of colour, purples, pinks even browns and greens.  If the world existed in shades of black, white and grey I would find it impossible to be creative as I’m sure many other artists would. Colour evokes feelings, emotions and memories, it’s so important to all of us every day.

“St Ives Abstract’ in acrylic is an engaging and intriguing painting.  Please can you explain further about your choice of format and the inspiration behind this work?”

I find when I visit places my eyes are drawn to many different views and small things too so sometimes I find it difficult to do a piece of work with one point of view. By splitting the canvas into sections I can include more information about the place, show people how I saw things on that day. St Ives is such a piece of work. The first section is my representation of one of Barbara Hepworth’s beautiful sculptures that sits in the garden of her home in St Ives, now a museum and gallery.  The sky behind it was so blue and the shadows on the metal created many colours that on a cloudy day wouldn’t be there.  While in St Ives we visited the Tate St Ives Gallery and had a coffee in the café that has a view of Porthmeor beach directly outside the gallery. The middle section of the painting is the view from our table, I focused on the construction of the windows and a balustrade outside the window as I found the shapes they created more interesting than the view beyond. The left-hand section of the picture is my interpretation of the patterns that are made in the sand by the receding tide as it leaves the pebbles standing proud above the sand. The colours I used for this were actually present when you looked closely but in much smaller areas than I have used them.  I like to pick out the not so obvious and make it bigger and bolder.

“I love your use of layers of imagery and the referencing of photographs in your acrylic painting ‘North Taunton, A Summer Abstract’.  Can you tell us more about this work and your thinking behind this piece? “

Again, with North Tawton, A Summer Walk there were many images I wanted to represent in the picture, different views that I see every day when I’m walking my dog. Some distant and some closer so the small pictures enclosed within the canvas gave me the opportunity to do that. I find using green really difficult and rarely use it. But in this picture, it frames the smaller images because it’s everywhere I look when I’m out walking and I couldn’t have replaced it with anything else and achieved the same effect. I hadn’t painted for quite a while and this picture allowed me to use different techniques within the small frames to feel my way back into painting. It was painted in summer so I hope it gives the feeling of long hot summer days.