Give a warm welcome to our featured artist this week — Vivien Blackburn!

 

Website: Vivien Blackburn Sketchbooks Blog: Paintings Prints and Stuff Vivien, please tell us about yourself. I went to art college when I left school, but dropped out after my foundation year, married, had 2 lovely daughters and didn’t go back until a long time later as a mature student to finish my degree – but I did! I graduated in 2000 – it was a race with eldest daughter to see who graduated first (she did law). I did :) So …. 2 grown up daughters, one husband, 2 crazy cats. I paint, read, chat to friends – all the usual stuff.

How would you describe your art? Loose, often plein air, representational to abstract – depending on subject and whether I’m still in research mode or developing larger canvasses. Ravelled Sleaves was a digital, degree art project, on ‘poor me’! – trapped then in a job that had become soul destroyinlgy boring – I needed the money to finish the degree so couldn’t walk out :( – I have done since though :) explanation on website. Most of my work is painting, related to landscape. See website. I work virtually all media. Who are your favorite artists? Kurt Jackson, David Prentice, David Tress, Ross Loveday, John Virtue, Turner, Monet, Schiele, Rembrandt, Toulouse Lautrec, Degas, Odilon Redon and many others.

Tell us about your creative process. mmmm …. thinking hard. I sketch plein air a lot and these may become finished pieces, they may remain in my sketchbooks. My sketchbooks are important to me. I often work plein air in oils as I can get colours down fast and make changes quickly, responding to the changing light. Studio work doesn’t reproduce this work but moves on from it, often abstracting but using the colours and light of sketches and memory. Sketching fixes scenes in my memory so they are retained more clearly. I often use the computer in the development of ideas, playing with Photoshop. These images may become something in their own right, as with the Ravelled Sleaves series, or may remain just ’sketches’ and ideas that are developed in paint. In what ways do you live artfully? I teach art to adults, show work regularly, belong to several local art groups both formal and informal ones, paint a lot, live surrounded by finished works and works in progress and a husband who gets fed up with falling over canvasses and attaching D rings or mirror plates! and of course I write about art in my blog, my own and art in general.

What is your personal motto or mantra? It ought to be ‘never put off until tomorrow what you can do today’ but is more likely to be ‘oh ****** the deadline is tomorrow and I’d better get this sorted NOW’ Thanks, Vivien for giving us a chance to get to know you! Check out more of Vivien’s work at her website and be sure to visit her blog Paintings Prints and Stuff.

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If you’re interested in being a featured artist, let us know! Check out the Feature Me! Questionnaire and tell us about yourself and your art.