Jan Coventry
I use colour and gestural brushwork to capture and evoke the mood of the environment and the moment of mark making when working in the landscape. I have continued to paint and draw outside, returning to our studio in Portobello to develop the work. “When I am removed from the landscape which has inspired me, the music of Arvo Part and Jan Garbarek is a spiritual lodestone taking me into the ‘headspace’ where I need to be in order to create new work.”
My work is rooted in the natural environment – not only as a source of inspiration but as a physical experience of painting. For me, sitting painting in the landscape is a viscerally physical and emotional process. Inevitably it is a struggle when working in the studio, developing new work from those sketches and paintings made outside.
The work and words of the English painter Ivon Hitchens also help me to crystalize my own thinking and processes. He felt torn between the inspiration he got from direct contact with nature and the increasing desire to let the picture have a life of its own.
“Yet the picture must be about something – the shapes and colours evocative of things experienced in life and so arousing emotion by association. Otherwise we are out in the wilderness” Ivon Hitchens
For me these words resonate as I too struggle with the tension between nature and image.
My work is rooted in the natural environment – not only as a source of inspiration but as a physical experience of painting. For me, sitting painting in the landscape is a viscerally physical and emotional process. Inevitably it is a struggle when working in the studio, developing new work from those sketches and paintings made outside.
The work and words of the English painter Ivon Hitchens also help me to crystalize my own thinking and processes. He felt torn between the inspiration he got from direct contact with nature and the increasing desire to let the picture have a life of its own.
“Yet the picture must be about something – the shapes and colours evocative of things experienced in life and so arousing emotion by association. Otherwise we are out in the wilderness” Ivon Hitchens
For me these words resonate as I too struggle with the tension between nature and image.