Hi there and hope you are all keeping well! This month has really felt like Autumn here in lovely but soggy North Yorkshire in the UK… The colours around me are already feeding into my work, and I’m loving those rich Autumn tones!

One of the frustrations of being a full time artist is that you actually don’t get as much time to spend on making work as you think you will, and this month has been a bit like that to be honest. The first and perhaps most noticeable thing, if you’re reading this on my website, is that I finally took the leap and decided to build my own site. I have to start by saying that this is absolutely not my natural territory or skill-set, in fact I was rather terrified by the whole idea! The final push to do it was that my running costs from a web developer had increased over time, and also I felt I wanted to try to take control of my online presence, especially by being able to make changes and add new ideas quickly. After much research and psyching up, I settled on Squarespace, which had a great reputation for Art based websites, and I built a trial website, moved my Domain name and then launched my new site! It really wasn’t as hard or as scary as I had been imagining. The site as it is now, is the first draft if you like and I will definitely add much more content, and refine and improve as I work out how to use various features….

The exciting news is that my exhibition of new work is open in the lovely Bils and Rye Gallery in Harrogate : https://contemporarysculpture.gallery/paintings, and online wherever you are in the World! I’m showing collections of work inspired by Yorkshire Landscapes and also two very large canvases, which are (‘in old money’ as canvases are often still measured like that), about 4ft x 5ft.

The Staveley Series are shown close to, surrounded by some lovely ceramics and sculpture in the very stylish and wonderful Bils and Rye Gallery: https://contemporarysculpture.gallery

The three Staveley pictures are part of an ongoing series, painted in lockdown, and showing abstracted ideas from a beautiful local wetland reserve, which I walk regularly. The ideas behind it centre around, dark pools of water, reflected light, and glimpsed details of reeds, scrubby trees and floating pontoons.

Shaft of Light: Near Morvah is part of an extensive group of paintings which derive from walking the Atlantic coast of Cornwall in all weathers…this one represents a period of calm, and the painting has a complex picture surface created with mixed media including hand painted Japanese rice papers, and finished with oil glazes.

Seams of Jasper (above), is part of the same series as Shaft of Light: Morvah, (previous image), but in very different conditions. Here the light is bright and the wind is blustery over land which is flecked with colour, including the rather gorgeous orange-gold suggesting the mineral Jasper, which was mined here in times gone by.

As an artist one of the things that can really drive you mad, is the fact that some paintings just won’t come together; you can see that they have potential, but for one reason or another, they just don’t quite feel right. Having worked with so many artists now, I’ve taught myself not to panic when this happens-it’s just a stage and it does eventually pass. There are lots of different strategies for overcoming this equivalent of writer’s block, and the one that works for me, is to put the offending work right away for a while, where I can’t even see it!

Sometimes month’s later, it works to get it out, stick it on the studio wall, and see if it starts talking to you! You can’t force it, and sometimes even then you really just can’t see a way forward. Sometimes in fact, you just have to paint over a canvas and start afresh! The painting below is one that has had a long slow process, with many hiccups on the way. I finally got it out a week or so ago after a considerable period in solitary, and suddenly realised what I needed to do…. it then came together pretty quickly with just a few more layers and some adjusting.

Anyway it’s from a walk near Malham, and is playing with ideas of cracks and fissures; channels in the rocky landscape…Phew!! Finished!!

I’m calling it Landscape Fragments II.

Well I think that’s all for this month…if you haven’t already, do check out my new website, and keep checking in to see how it develops, and have a look at the Bils and Rye Gallery website, if you can’t get there in person.

Take care, Jo x

*All text and images copyright Jo York 2020