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Tara Leaver

artist + aquaphile
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How a painting comes together - taraleaverart.com

How a painting comes together

February 15, 2019 in In the Studio

This is a question that seems to come from artists and non artists alike. I know I’m always fascinated by the process of others, and the premise behind my own teaching is always to focus on the how and the why as much as, if not more than {at least initially}, the what.

Paying attention to the clarity and insights process brings, and the questions it raises, are fundamental to what makes the final piece connect with the viewer.

I find that the deeper I know myself, my values, what feels True for me, the more specific and singular the work I make.

So how do my paintings come together?

The short answer is, it depends!

There isn’t a step by step process. I know that works for many artists, but for me there is always an element of unpredictability and chaos in the work that means I can’t - and don’t want to - pin it down too much.

At the moment, it looks roughly like this:

I work mainly on wood panels, sometimes on deep sided primed canvas. I don’t prime the panels because the rawness of the wood is part of both the story and the aesthetic of the paintings.

I also have various paint mixes of different consistencies in squeezy bottles. I mix them myself, sometimes with water, sometimes with airbrush medium, or both.

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Typically, I’ll pour, splash, and throw the liquid paint directly onto the panel as a starting point. I’ve developed various ways of doing this to get the effect I’m after without controlling it too much.

Because the current work is about swimming and immersion in your environment, the application of the paint - like the use of wood panels - is as relevant to that as it is to the aesthetic of the finished piece.

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I often intervene with one or both of my two favourite tools at this point - a Liquitex 3 inch brush, and my trusty Princeton Catalyst wedge, although I try to keep manipulation to a minimum or the immediacy is easily lost.

The tiniest nuance can mean the difference between what feels like a really successful painting and one that seems to fight me at every turn and quickly feels laboured.

Sometimes there will be several layers of this ‘liquidy’ part of the process. This can mean waiting overnight for the paint to soak into the panels and dry, or I’ll use wet on wet {or wet on damp} depending on the effect I’m after.

Once some colour is down, the painting starts talking to me, and I do my best to listen and respond while bringing my own intentions and ideas to the conversation.

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The act of painting and drawing on the piece can be relatively quick; often the longest part of the process is the listening and considering. A painting can hang in limbo for weeks waiting for its final touches, and often other paintings made during that time will inform how that can happen.

While a lot of my process is intuitive and chaos driven, there are slower paced, more considered areas brought in by the hand drawn elements, like the plants and birds. This is intentional and part of expressing the experiences the paintings are trying to convey.

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It feels like I’ve barely brushed the surface of how a painting comes together here, but hopefully this gives some insight into the process and the thinking behind it.

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Aquaphiles: artists and water

January 22, 2019 in Inspiration

Typically I shrug off labels, preferring to be more fluid {ha} and unpindownable, but when I recently discovered this word, it felt so true I decided to adopt it:

Aquaphile: someone who loves water or the ocean: someone who loves to swim

Quite honestly I think most, if not all of us have an aquaphile inside us, to varying degrees. We are each, after all, around 60% water, living on a planet that is 70% covered by it. It’s just that for some of us the call of the waves is stronger.

My work hasn’t always been about water, specifically. It wasn’t really until I moved to live by the sea and cleared the vision-obscuring fog of long term depression out of my system that I fully realised how significant it is to me, and as a Pisces it isn’t really that surprising I suppose.

I noticed recently that some of my favourite art and artists deal with water; some were already inspirations, others I only discovered more recently, well into my aquatic explorations. Today I’m sharing four of them; unintentionally all British.

Emily Ball

My children were learning to swim and I sat by the pool watching them being held up by the water. I cannot swim and this detachment increased my fascination of how they moved, floated and finally began to swim so beautifully through the water.

I’ve been in love with Emily Ball’s swimming paintings for years. Hers is for me the kind of work you wish you’d made, knowing you’d never be able to because that wasn’t your art to make, but you dream of it all the same.

She made a series called Floating World, inspired by watching her children learn to swim, and followed it with further explorations called Swim the Body Electric.

To me she somehow captures viscerally and truthfully the experience of being in water - something I’m constantly aiming for in my own work. Her mark making is out of this world.

Clockwise from top left: Learning to Swim, Evie Swimming, Float Shimmer Dive

Clockwise from top left: Learning to Swim, Evie Swimming, Float Shimmer Dive

Tania Kovats

I want my work to speak to our liquid selves, the part of our identities that is fluid and shifting and hard to hold.

A much more recent discovery for me, Tania Kovats’ work is more conceptual. It fascinates me in a completely different way, partly because it is so different, and yet deals with the same overall subject.

Her focus is more on the environment; she’s travelled extensively to research and create her work, as well as enlisting others, as for All the Seas, an arrangement of glass bottles containing water from every sea on the planet, for which she asked people around the world to send her samples.

Her Evaporation sculpture is so beautifully thought out and constructed, and reminds me of the importance of process and materials in expressing your meaning as much as in the final outcome.

There’s a fascinating and articulate interview with her here.

Clockwise from top left: Sea Marks, All the Seas, Evaporation

Clockwise from top left: Sea Marks, All the Seas, Evaporation

Kari Furre

The underwater world has always fascinated me. And fish skin itself is the perfect upcycling material.

Kari Furre is a sculptor and long distance, wild swimmer who lives in Devon in the UK. There’s a fantastic short video about her on her website which I recommend; I’ve watched it several times.

Her sculptures are made from fish leather, which she tans herself using sustainable Nordic techniques. She produces these delicate, translucent vessels, taking something that would otherwise be wasted, and lovingly and painstakingly crafting it into something lastingly beautiful.

I love the idea of using an actual product of the sea to make art about the sea. I love too, that this kind of 3D way of working, so different from painting in many ways, inspires me to think in a more multidimensional way about my own work.

Clockwise from top left: Oil tanned and dyed salmon, Ghost Fishing, salmon tissue bowls

Clockwise from top left: Oil tanned and dyed salmon, Ghost Fishing, salmon tissue bowls

Bryan Wynter

A stream finds its way over rocks. The force of the stream and the quality of the rocks determine the stream's bed... There are no streams or rocks in my paintings but a comparable process of dynamic versus static elements has attended their development and brought about their final form.

Bryan Wynter was one of the St Ives group of artists. He moved down to Cornwall in 1945 to live in a remote and basic cottage in West Penwith, and during part of his career made paintings about water. He was very keen on canoeing, and used one to traverse many of Cornwall’s numerous waterways.

Wynter’s nature based paintings were done in such a way that the process followed the way nature behaves. For me he captures water in very evocative ways, from the obviously expressive Spate III to the more deliberate, graphic feel of Saja and Green Confluence.

It fascinates me how other artists feel into water, and come back out with these unique languages.

Left to Right: Spate III, Saja, Green Confluence

Left to Right: Spate III, Saja, Green Confluence

standing in the rock pool.jpg

Water in Words: A reading list of books that support the work

December 29, 2018 in Inspiration

As I’ve become increasingly interested in expressing the experience of water in my work, I’ve been feeding the left side of my brain with a succession of water and swimming related books.

People sometimes ask me about these, since I occasionally share them on Instagram, so I’ve compiled a list of what I’ve read so far, in no particular order. I’ve starred the ones I particularly enjoyed, and will add to the list as I inevitably read more!

*Waterlog - Roger Deakin

The Mindful Art of Wild Swimming: Reflections for Zen seekers - Tessa Wardley

*Leap In - Alexandra Heminsley

*The Soul of an Octopus - Sy Montgomery

Swimming with Seals - Victoria Whitworth

How to Read Water: Clues and patterns from puddles to the sea - Tristan Gooley

*Sea and Shore Cornwall: Common and Curious Findings - Lisa Woollett

*Sea Journal - Lisa Woollett

The Book of Tides - William Thompson

Swim Wild: Dive into the natural world and discover your inner adventurer - Jack Hudson, Calum Hudson, and Robbie Hudson

The Water Book - Alok Jha

Wild Swimming, Hidden Beaches: Explore the secret coast of Britain - Daniel Start

Pond Life: A Swimmer’s Journal - Al Alvarez

Swims - Elizabeth Jane Burnett

The Lido - Libby Page

Blue Mind: How water makes you happier, more connected and better at what you do - Wallace J. Nichols

Turning: Lessons from swimming Berlin’s lakes - Jessica J Lee

Find a Way: One untamed and courageous life - Diana Nyad

*Wild Woman Swimming - Lynne Roper

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