Painting with Claire Harrison
Claire started painting at the early age of three and as,
she was also very interested in natural history, gravitated towards the natural
world for her subjects. She started her career by hiring a hall for an
exhibition in six months time and then worked on producing the paintings to
fill it! These early works were produced
using photographs and Photoshop to obtain manipulated images as a basis for her
paintings.
Now Claire spends
longer on sketching than painting . She first draws in ink with a Rotring pen
and produces photocopies of the drawing and then experiments with different
colours on the copies. She does a
careful colour study for each painting using colour pencils as well as paint.
Pattern ideas come from an intensive study of Islamic Art.
Also ideas based on Fibonacci numbers
and fractal patterns form a starting point for much of her work. Fractals are
complex patterns repeated constantly and in diminishing size eg snowflakes or
the chambers in a Nautilus shell. She repeats the main image in a pattern within
it eg a daisy repeated as a pattern making the spirals on the daisy's centre. If
the spirals on a daisy centre or pine cone are counted in one direction a
Fibonacci number is arrived at. If counted in the other direction the result is
the neighbouring number in the series. Each Fibonacci number is formed by
adding the two numbers before it:-
0 1 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 etc
Claire then showed us some pictures of dragonfly wings, foxgloves,
snail shells, dandelion heads and violas to illustrate the above points before
demonstrating her working method for her daisy painting.
Gesso is not used on a base but she uses MDF board soaked
with water and painted with a thin layer of acrylic allowing the colours to mix
such as red, yellow or white.
This process is continued by putting on firstly thin layers
of oil paint and then finally thick layers. This produces a translucency to the
final painting as the lower layers shine through. The medium she uses for the
first layers is Spectagel which is fast drying. Other layers are painted using
Liquin as the medium and this allows the paint to run. Impasto medium is used
for the final layers. Colours are mixed on the board.
Claire traces her daisy drawing onto the canvas and paints
the daisies with thin watercolour and a fine brush. The petals are then
sketched in. She then goes over the whole with oil paint with linseed oil and
uses linseed oil to blend in the tonal areas where the petals join the disc. The painting takes a week to dry in hot
weather but normally 2 to 3 weeks. Claire usually allows a month for drying for
an exhibition painting. As it usually takes 6 months to complete one painting
it means that Claire is multi-tasking with a few paintings being produced at
any one time.
This was a fascinating evening and hopefully inspired
everyone to try to produce a close-up painting for the competition in
September.
