Marc Chagall once said
‘Great art picks up where nature ends’
Now don’t get us wrong. We’re not saying our Art is great, that’s not the important bit here, but bear with us and we’ll get there.
As an artist, you’re constantly on the lookout for inspiration, the irony of course being that the more you search for it the less you find, and it’s often from the places you don’t think to look, or the from things that are always right in front of you, which it comes from.
No prizes for guessing where we’re going here…. Yep, you guessed it… The inspiration for NewNotNew member Kym Haversons latest series of artworks is Nature. We’re not talking the birds and the bees here, or indeed, not old, naked foreign couples on a beach you ‘stumbled upon’ (let’s not lie here, we all check out the nudist section of the lonely planet guide of whichever random European country we’ve somehow let the Thompson holidays saleswoman talk us into going…. “it’s the new Croatia!’’), we’re talking the big things – like the sea, the earth, the sky, space.
It’s all in the colours you see. The way they move together, blend into one another. The contrasts between the darks and lights, the dull and the vivid. The ability nature has to create something so beautiful from the chaos of a seemingly random occurrence.
The idea isn’t to outright copy a picture of the sea or space, but to mimic how it forms, the spontaneity of it. So she’s been dripping, flicking and spraying paints onto the canvas, using thick blocks of colour that are then stripped apart by large amounts of water and varnish. Letting different mediums of colours layer on top of each other, dispersing across the canvas, fighting each other, contradicting themselves, connecting then moving apart again. Picking up and moving the canvas so the paints can move across each other, allowing layers of gold spray paint to settle on top of bright reds, blues and oranges – manipulating the randomness to become what is actually a loose compositional structure of the certain strain of nature she is looking to portray.
On a final point, early in the series, Kym noted a by-product of the use of spray paints and varnish that leads the paintings to, in effect, change their appearance when light is shone on them from various angles, and in differing strengths. Much like the very acts of nature which inspired them. This will lead to an interesting problem when it comes to displaying them – and when the time comes – we’ll let you know what solution she comes up with…
There's loads more on Kyms work on her website if you fancy having a look
There's loads more on Kyms work on her website if you fancy having a look
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