Explore your mix of media
Lydia Bauman experiments with a variety of unconventional materials and mixed-media techniques – be inspired to try these in your own work to achieve some interesting effects
Lydia Bauman experiments with a variety of unconventional materials and mixed-media techniques – be inspired to try these in your own work to achieve some interesting effects
Ihave never felt satisfied with the traditional media of oil, acrylic and watercolour. Even as a student of fine art I felt the need to somehow distress the surface of my paintings to give them more texture by scratching into them, or enriching them with collage elements.
We all have certain epiphanies along the way that take us down one or other trajectory as artists. The most significant epiphany for me was the one involving the landlord of the flat where I lived while a student. One day he was decorating the bathroom and filling the cracks in pink plaster with a white filler. I thought those fine lines, the overlaying of chalky textures and colours, the mystery of layers barely visible below other sanded-down layers, to be just about the most beautiful effect I had ever seen! I bought my first pack of Polyfilla and never looked back, turning pigments mixed with white plaster into my main medium for paintings for years to come. I have since enriched my technique with the addition of resins, waxes, texture gels, embossing powders, patinas, rusting solutions, sand, grit, glitter – I’m always on the look-out for new possibilities. I remember the moment I looked inside my first tin of baby formula milk and the first thought passing through my mind being ‘could this add an interesting effect for my painting?’
Reference
From first experimenting and honing my techniques with the subject of still life, I moved on to landscape. My technique served me well in conveying something of the physical quality of landscapes as different as the cultivated fields and meadows of Europe to the wilderness of Morocco, Israel, Australia and most recently New Mexico – all of which were the subjects of major solo exhibitions.
I invariably base my paintings on photographs taken on my travels. Sketching outdoors is never an essential
step for me, it’s just a way of paying close attention to the detail of the land, of getting right inside it, in a way that the instant camera click can never provide. But the very act of taking the photo – selecting the square format, aiming my viewfinder, choosing a composition – is already a preliminary act of creating the work. I then take that image as a starting point and because it is already at a remove from the original view, it helps me to concentrate on the things that matter – composition, colour, texture. In other words, I move away from ‘a view’ in a literal, topographical sense, towards an event on the surface of my panel.
Formats
The square format, so unusual for landscape painting, was one of my epiphanies: I experienced it when I found myself face to face with a magnificent painting by Monet.
The surface of his waterlily pond at Giverny – flickers of blue, purple and green, heavily impastoed, forcefully asserting their physical presence, filling the perfectly square canvas to the rim. I saw in a flash the possibilities of painting which combines figurative representation with an acknowledgement of the act of painting. Moving on to large square panels for my landscapes I began to select views in which depth is indicated not by the illusion of traditional vanishing point perspective, but by the stacking up of flat planes, each textured and tangible – foreground, middle ground, background, rising up to push out as much of the sky as possible and let me focus on the gritty reality of soil, line of trees, rocky hillside. To look at, those layers with their random marks and chance surface effects might appear almost abstract. That’s where the single tree or a solitary house dead centre of the composition, will indicate the scale of the landscape and through its modelling in light and shade re-assert its reality. My paintings are about this sort of dialogue.
Experimental
With so much emphasis on surface patterns and textures, it is perhaps inevitable that my paintings might come across as ‘decorative’, which today gets a bit of a bad press. But along with one of my favourite painters, Henri Matisse, who wanted his
‘decorative’ paintings to be ‘like an easy armchair in which to rest after a day’s work’, I believe in the life-enhancing power of beauty: I will reposition a bit of vegetation to get a better balance, I will take some liberty with my colours to make them sing, I will bring out my gold leaf, my mica particles, to show the splendour of sunlight reflecting on a rock. Every square and rectangle I paint on has to have its own aesthetic integrity and strength.
That said, many of the effects I achieve happen purely organically, by chance. There is no way of knowing how instant rust or patina might bloom on the surface of my painting or how resin will flow and how much sand it will trap. With experience, you can control some of the results but it’s the surprise element that keeps the process fresh and exciting. I dread the day when I wake up without the hope that something in the studio that day will surprise me.
Surprises of course are risky. The buyers of a very early work were alarmed that the beeswax in their painting appeared to be melting. They had displayed the painting in a sun lounge and it was suffering as much as the expensive Persian rug on the floor.
I took the painting back to the studio to repair the damage but to make things worse, the painting somehow managed to fall off the easel overnight and I found it face down, with the entire plaster-based painting deposited on the floor, like a jigsaw puzzle. I decided it was time for some professional advice and made an appointment with the conservation department of the National Gallery, where I was already working as a guide – and have never had any problems since.
My technique is experimental and unusual, but it is tailor-made for my particular objectives and, as such, gives me that unique voice we all look for as artists. I hope my story will inspire you to take chances, be inventive and go beyond the conventional, if that is what your particular artistic journey calls for.
Lydia’s exhibition ‘Earthworks’ is at the Mall Galleries, London, from July 5–11.