Last year we launched our Arty Afternoons series on YouTube to encourage people with spinal injuries, their loved ones and all of our supporters to while away a lockdown afternoon or two getting creative.
To see the series, please click here
A whole host of artists generously gave up their time to film short videos, which we then shared with all of you and it was wonderful to see your warm response.
Now, with the arrival of the new year, we’ve been delighted to welcome many new artists to the Arty Afternoon fold, with the first video of 2021 coming from abstract painter, Karen Welsh.
To watch Karen’s video, please click ‘Play’ below
Karen is part of the PLAIN ARTS Salisbury network, the leading visual arts network for Salisbury and the surrounding area. They offer member artists and art organisations support and opportunities and as a result of working with PLAIN ARTS, we were lucky enough to discover Karen.
As an enthusiastic and incredibly upbeat artist, her video offers a perfectly positive start to our latest series. Despite being born in Surrey, it’s the Wiltshire landscape that now inspires her. Since moving here in 2011, Karen has been on an artistic journey that has brought her to abstraction, with her paintings developing from figurative, through to semi-abstract and abstract.
Her artistic style conveys the feeling of freedom, of being on top of the world, which she says is how she herself feels about the local landscape. Karen begins each work with gestural markings, then layers paint over the top, concentrating all the time on balancing tonal value with colour harmony. She then develops her work until she achieves the desired outcome.
The result, we think you’ll agree, is rather beautiful.
In her video, Karen captures this process, emphasising that art is rarely complete after a first attempt. It’s all about revisiting a piece, building up the elements of a picture over time and never putting any pressure on yourself to rapidly finish creating something. Eventually, everything will come together and it will be more than satisfying to see when it does.
We are enormously grateful to both Karen and PLAIN ARTS for helping all of us to once again give being arty at home a good go.
