Venturing into a New Style

Marian Lishman

For a fair while I have wanted to start painting some multi-layered abstracts in a similar style to some I have done in the past. There are a few artists that I admire who do this kind of painting – in particular I could name Jane Davies (based in the US), Boo Compton and Patricia Lomax (both Suffolk artists). I love their style of work and have been waiting for a while to get a chance to spend time doing art like that.

Now that my son has gone back to school again after Lockdown 3, I have been able to spend some more time i the studio again and have started on some of these canvases. I have a few on the go – a couple of them I have been working on for a while – and they do take quite a while to finish as they need so many layers and iterations until I am happy with the result. So far I have finished two of them, although the first one was not totally in the style I was aiming for.

I hope to have some of them done by this summer and all the ones that I finish will of course be listed on the website. The first one finished is this one:

grey blue white abstract painting
“Waiting It Out”

I’m really happy how it turned out although I think people will be surprised as to how much of a deviation it is from my fluid acrylic style. It may not be to everyone’s taste but I believe it is important to learn and develop and pursue new avenues in art every now and again. It is not completely dissimilar to some old paintings I did a number of years ago for example this one from 2011:

It is interesting to play with mark making and layering and using different sized strokes to create the final effect.

This year is still a bit of an unknown. I have had more exhibitions cancelled in the next few months. Things are unlikely to get back to any kind of normality before June at least and because events take a lot of planning, there may still be more cancellations.

I will be taking part in Suffolk Open Studios again this year. I’ll be opening my studio/garden/drive for the last weekend in June and will be doing some painting for any visitors to see plus will have a display of all the paintings I have at home.

Looking back at my last blog post I now can’t actually remember what the exciting opportunity was going to be! No doubt covid put a stop to it whatever it was!