After the Autumn Storms Print

Studio Schaumloeffel - Contemporary oil painting in the Cotswolds. Paint is to be relished on many levels, from the instinctual and emotional, to the sensual and evocative. My thinking is centred on the activity of applying paint, and I feel as well as think through it. - About Painting Paintings I am interested in sharing my observations of my immediate surrounds and perceptions of the senses through the medium of colour, gesture and paint. My paintings contain a sense of nature and of florals but are not depicting a specific flower or element in nature. While the observations and subsequent expressive marks are very personal, I entice the viewer along to visually explore, to find themselves engaged and identify with the painting on a personal level. The joy and pleasure is in a swath of paint that leads you into the painting, in marks that have a physicality to them, a dominance then offset with some flirtatious flicks of colour seducing you to a smile. My studio is filled with the smell of oil paint. You find big heaps of paint on my palette, stacks of art books and seductive colour-pops in the form of collected mementos, cards with dried clumps of discarded paints scraped from surfaces, small colour studies and fresh flowers. Creativity being a process, many painterly decisions are made along the way, not all successful, many surprising, but all adding to the joy of creating, of pushing paint, of playing with colour, aesthetics, and visual design. These traces of the creative process are an essential part of my work. My fundamental quest is to express something personal in a bold yet playful way, composing lively, elegant, emotion-filled and playful abstracted scenes. My love for lush rich oil paint shows in the application and the dynamic surface of my works of art. What excites me is the direct dialogue between the canvas, the paint, my gestures and my brush. The paintings don't just paint themselves in an obvious way but I work and wrestle, sometimes dance with them it feels. The narrative is in the paint itself and laid bare by way of application. I hope they are accessible to all, not complicated but bringing the viewer a reaction that involves vision, touch and smell. This intimate chat between me and my paintings leads to engaging multifaceted works that are fresh and very personal. You are invited to join the chat!