Going Darker.

My New Year’s Resolution was to create more meaningful work and to have fun doing it. This year I have momentarily stopped taking small portrait commissions because I felt like I was churning them out. This might seem good from a business perspective, but as an illustrator I feel you’re always caught in between wanting to be a successful businessperson and wanting to be a great artist. Sometimes doing well business-wise means having less time to think and experiment and therefore being unhappy with your work.

Since taking less work I’ve seen my personal work change quite drastically in a month. It has become darker, more personal, more reflective, more textural. I realise that the transition between my past work and my new work is not exactly smooth, but on closer inspection there are always elements and themes that I go back to, such as using textured brushes, working with shapes, people, narrative and patterns. Somehow my more colourful work and my darker stuff will need to find a way to live together in my portfolio.

What inevitably will happen is that I will start to include this style in my commercial commissions and it may water itself down, but this is natural. Without the raw stage of doing artwork for myself, the resulting commercial commissions will be hollow and with little substance.

Since I moved on the outskirts of the city and closer to the Scottish countryside, I can see a very heavy influence of this in my work. You draw what you know and what you see, and at the moment that’s people, trees, hills and a lot of grey weather.

I feel like I’m finally arriving towards something that I like and that I can experiment with further. In the midst of this exploration, I’ve received five broken, decorated ceramic pieces from Hazel Terry, an artist/photographer and environmentalist. Hazel collects these artefacts from a midden on the North of the Forth, North of Edinburgh, Scotland. She is now distributing them to artists to inspire them, and boy have they worked for me. I’ve found them useful to add something unexpected to my compositions but that still works in the narrative. They add something more meaningful than say, random patterns.

The next stage of experimentation is very much unknown, and I guess that’s the beauty of it. Moving away from the iPad again is definitely on my list, however this is harder to do with a toddler running around. Watch this space for more work updates. I will hopefully post more regularly than once every two years.