Finding Inspiration Part 1.

I’ve been working with some other artists in a group called 15 Hundred Lives and we have been doing a 2-day monthly public art event for the past 5 months. We take over a fairly large artspace, Creative Bubble in Swansea and start a new piece of work, inviting the public to come in and see how we develop a piece of art from scratch. It’s been very good for me because I’ve been experimenting and doing things I wouldn’t if I was just plugging away on my own in my studio.

Working over a ground of yellow ochre acrylic paint

 Finding inspiration is the hardest thing about being an artist as far as I’m concerned. Technical ability is improved by diligent practice but finding something to draw, print, paint, whatever is the hardest thing for me. But inspiration can come from all sorts of places. Just before the last Creative Bubble event in December, I was reading a newspaper article about a woman who has set up a feminist website to commemorate women murdered by men in the UK during 2013, many, but not all, victims of domestic violence. It’s called Counting Dead Women. I printed out the article and some of the photos she’d put on her website and spent two days working from them. I hadn’t been looking for subject matter like this but the article inspired as well as distressed me and here’s what I did on Day 1.

I found the article and the process of creating these portraits harrowing. It really started to bring the statistics to life for me. More tomorrow……….