Bringing focus to your work
Sarah Edmonds suggests ways artists can take a long-term view to allow their work to take on deeper clarity
As artists and humans, we are constantly evolving. Whether you are in your rose or blue period, you’ll be absorbing influences from all corners and developing your style and thought processes consciously or unconsciously. Whilst much of this maturing and development will be organic, there is value in focusing your projects with a long-term view.
Rather than snatching at short-term ideas which may encourage floundering or uncertainty, you could take some time out to plan a year-long campaign and create a more cohesive collection. This will allow you to take a deep-dive into your subject, take your narrative, imagination and creativity to the next level and so your artwork will take on a deeper clarity.
In terms of marketing, more focused themes will keep your followers and collectors engaged with fresh work, whilst inspiring a greater understanding of the narrative. Paintings and prose are a happy partnership – artworks with a story, a theme, a question that challenges, teaching you something or provoking an emotional response. These are the exhibitions and collections that stay in our thoughts. Distil your current projects, bring clarity and originality to them. Name your collection cleverly, package it up and make it palatable and marketable. Take it one step further, even when you think you’ve exhausted the subject – it will surprise you!
The ongoing struggle for the artist is between a sense of control, and a complete lack of it. It is this elusive balance we all chase, that is so hard to achieve. It is exactly the point at which control collides with alchemy where the magic happens – knowing how to harness it and when to let go is the real challenge. In the same way, striking a balance between being commercially strategic and the simple act of creation is the push and pull of life as a working artist.
I interviewed our case study, Kate Kelvin, on this subject because her style of painting is very distinctive. She has taken a lifetime, with many twists in the road, to distil her offering which straddles ‘materialistic
enquiry and the uncertain realm between thoughts and feelings’. As we understand ourselves and our motivations better, so our paintings evolve. This is the case for Kate, who took advantage of long periods of time during lockdown to reinvigorate her practice as she began to paint from memory, connecting emotions to her inner eye and translating it onto canvas.
What started as an unconscious act, has now become a visual signature. Exploration of ‘a unique form of expression, turning the unseen into the seen. Finding ways to bring feelings into existence from observation and experimentation. Not knowing what will emerge is the most exciting part of creating. Rules are abandoned, only the essence of a feeling remain. Without realising, I was training my memory muscle and connecting with my feelings from the walk, the light, the smells of the forest, sounds of the trees and wildlife, also the quietness.’
Q: Give us some idea of your journey to becoming a professional artist so far.
A: It has taken a lifetime. From a young age I drew, and my earliest memory was that I designed, and felt-tip penned, a five-inchdeep frieze all the way around the top of my bedroom wall, on wood-chip wallpaper of all things, it was a street scene, with shops, people and cars. I was about 11; it took ages. Then I went to art college at 18 and studied graphics, met my husband-to-be, had two lovely children, then divorced seven years later and did many jobs as a single parent, some involving art and some not.
As the children became independent my art came back in; it had been patiently waiting for the space to emerge again. And although I have been a member of many art groups over the years, had small exhibitions and showed at arts trails, it is mostly over the last ten years that I have been more consistent with it and my work now sells on Saatchi Art globally. Last year I completed a master’s degree in fine art which has always been a dream, I recently did a global Zoom talk for an art platform COMUNE about my work with Q&As and now I am working towards collating my work for the Stroud Arts Trail in October. I would then like to look for gallery representation.
Q: Your paintings have a very distinctive look – how did you find your style?
A: My style has developed over time, I studied portrait painting in London in the summer of 2013, thinking I would be a natural, having been a freelance hairand-makeup artist for so long, but it was difficult because I was used to painting a three-dimensional surface of a face but painting a three-dimensional face on a twodimensional surface flipped my brain and I had to learn a whole new process of thinking and doing, hand eye co-ordination. I also painted the landscape from my own photographs and then the landscape from above, from found photographs, because I liked the abstractness of the shapes and it was not evident that they were landscapes as such, they looked a bit more mysterious I suppose, more abstract.
I had a private tutor for a few months. He was a watercolour landscape artist, and his studio was next door to the photographer’s studio where I worked freelance for makeup shoots. He taught me how to really look at the details and the accuracy of what I was doing, Before this, my paintings looked flat. I’m not totally sure where my art comes from, it kind of takes over during the painting process and I become one with it in a sense. My paintings are not thought out beforehand, they appear when I feel the need to express a feeling.
Q: Expressing your feelings and emotions through art is central to your work – tell us more about your process. Would you call yourself an expressionist? Tell us about pedagogy, mind and matter and innovative materials!
A: I am an expressionist and also a fine artist and abstract painter too. It all started when I walked through the woods on my own, a lot, during the pandemic. My main job as a hair-and-makeup artist had stopped during