"The mineshaft in the garden", St Ives, Cornwall. April 2010.Watercolour pen and ink on watercolour paper
22"X30" (SOLD)
"What is the meaning of doing art for you?"
For me, art is more a way of seeing than doing. It is a daily
attitude rather than a final solution, so I'm looking at and
working out a journey with colours, shapes, smells, lines,
tones, forms and feelings and how they relate and work
together all the time.
I'm not a gregarious or expressive person so painting is my
outlet and I'm often surprised at the colourful outcome and
other people's kind responses to it. I paint because I want to
and I enjoy the process and freedom of it. I'm not a tortured
artist - I live and work in beautiful and historical surroundings
which I hope comes through in my work. I get a huge thrill to
see the final piece, as I never know what the end result will be.
Of course not all results are good, but I revel in the challenge
to improve, and aspire to become a better artist.
Sue Hodnett
www.suehodnett.co.uk
http://www.flickr.com/photos/43843677@N06/
14 comments:
What a stunning painting! I'm indebted to you for the introduction to Sue's work; thank you!
Thank you Jennifer. I see you are a follower now, that's great.
A daily attitude ..... I like that! Great painting. Off to see more of her work on Flickr.
Robyn I hope you enjoyed yourself on flickr. I love Sue's work and really enjoyed what she had to say.
Very interesting. Sue, I love the sound of your approach and journey. I wish I could adopt a similar approach but I tend to feel that time restrictions mean I'm under pressure to create a finished article every time. Hopefully if I can get more time to paint and draw I'll relax about it more.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to read this, and then found the website & Flickr links - it's an interesting project Katherine has come up with and I look forward to reading many others in the future.
Best wishes and happy painting!
Sue
Cecca I wish you luck on that one, I think we all have different approaches and it takes a lot of conscious effort on our part to change our pace or attitude. Sometimes it takes all my awareness to slow down enough just to put new paint on the palette if I am in the groove.
Sue thank you so much for your participation in the project. I am a big fan of your work and loved what you had to say.
Thanks to Katherine for this interesting blog, and to Sue for her thoughs about art-making. I'm pretty much in line with Sue's thoughts on process. Cecca- even though sometimes I only have 5 minutes, I draw every single day, and that has given me the freedom to not worry about how any particular drawing is going to come out. Also, for myself, sometimes the pieces I don't have 'time to complete' are the best.
Skizo thank you for visiting and commenting.
Julia Kay thank you for your wonderful response to Sue and Cecca. Love this kind of dialog on the blog. I especially liked what you have to say about sometimes the best drawings you do are the unfinished ones.
Yes, what Julia says about time is really interesting. I'm a parent of 2 young children and also have a job in tourism/heritage and so my time is precious. Sometimes there is so little time to do anything creative that you can't worry too much about the outcome - some things work and others don't. I've developed a quick method of drawing and painting which suits my lifestyle so my paintings aren't generally over worked. There are lots of ideas going around in my head and for me it's more important to get those ideas down than to create one mega painting. I wonder if this is true for many other artists with lots of distractions and a desire to create?
Just come across this excellent blog and thread in particular as a result of hunting for a bit more info on sue's approach. I find it refreshing that you are not at all ulitmate in your work in the sense of questing to always create a finishec piece.....I am finding that having three or four paitnings on the go at the same time means you have less chance of getting precious and worried about any one piece and how it may or may not work out.
Sue can I say I love uour light touch and the speed with which you obviously work is what gives the work its wonderful, joyous and light character. Heres to NOT being a tortured artist!
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