I am still very much working on my artistic style. After a lot of thought about my ‘niche’ I have decided to surrender to the process and paint what inspires me and leave it at that instead of trying to push a distinctive style – I’m sure that will come with time. Although, it is safe to say that there is a bit of a trend coming through in my art. I have always loved drawing horses and animals, but I think I’ve come a long way from my drawings of when I was a kid of lions and dogs fighting each other. Obviously the dogs would always win – even as a kid I was rooting for the underdog.
I am drawn to a certain style of art. While I always appreciate hyper-realism and spend a long time looking at the art of my favourite hyper-realistic artists, I always find within about 5 hours into a hyper-realistic drawing, I am bored and ready to move on. I am not a perfectionist and can not operate happily at the level of perfectionism and attention to detail required to create these amazing hyperrealistic drawings. Instead I prefer a messy and loose aspect in art, both in the art I admire and in my own practice. I love getting my hands dirty and laughing at how I managed to get more pastel on my face than on my paper.
The art I admire most of all is a blend of these two styles; art that has a strong expressionist/abstract aspect as well as enough realism that it makes sense. The following artists are the ones I draw most of my inspiration when creating art:
Dawn Emerson
Dawn Emerson is an award winning pastel artist from Oregon.
“My work merges abstraction with realism to create mood and movement to express a unique quality about my subjects”
I appreciate her bold use of colour and texture where all her pastel strokes are visible-you can see exactly where she has been with her pastel-while still maintaining the integrity of her subject.
Karen Laurence-Rowe
Karen Laurence-Rowe is an award winning wildlife artist. She is most well-known for her African wildlife paintings although she paints an array of different subjects. She is very versatile and has great success with watercolours, oils and charcoal.
My favourite work from her is her wildlife watercolour art. I really like her use of a limited colour palette and emulate that in my work often. I also really like her use of negative space in a painting as it draws your eyes in all the right places.
Christian Hook
Christian Hook is an award winning oil painter artist, musician and arts teacher. His pieces are semi-realistic expressive illustrations of a variety of different subject matter.
Christian Hook’s work is probably the art I admire most on this list. I can spend a good 15 minutes looking at one of his paintings. There is so much going on but has an overall effortless look about it. I really like his use of a neutral colour palette and how he layers the background over the foreground in some places gives his work a very interesting glitchy effect that holds my attention.
Bénédicte Gelé
Bénédicte Gelé is an award winning French equine artist with a very distinctive style. She works with mixed media but most of her works feature black chalk.
I really like how Bénédict Gelé captures the expression of the horse – which can be hard to do. I also admire how she plays with the boundaries of horse anatomy, but not so much that it is distorted. I like the looseness of her strokes and her use of black that gives her work a dramatic and somewhat elegant quality to it that I admire.
