this is how it feels...

Since I set up a table in our living room, locked out of my studio, oh it must be years ago now, I’ve been getting used to new ways. Moving water and paint around in fluid flows across comfortingly weighty papers has been my distraction. Making a fresh familiar. Trying not to listen to any predetermined directions that I offered up, I have splashed and poured and spilt and stroked. Torn boundaries. Isolated eddies. Dried markings. Swirling and coalescing  into the beyond. I see worlds that are watery and sky. Land that is undefined and one. Sky and land together, inseparable. And so began a new series of small works on paper - collages with watercolour, India ink and graphite on textured paper. About the wholeness of our environment. No separation. Made slowly. This narrative thread trails on along many paths and ideas. And there will be many workings on the theme as I try to make sense of their meaning. For me. And for universal connections too. From time to...

More and more paint. Mark and mark again. What else? Always, especially when I feel there is a resolution approaching, I will turn the piece I’m working on round - 90 degrees, then another until I’m back where it started. I’m looking for something better than I’ve got already. And this is what happened this time. Suddenly it all made sense. A quarter turn and I sighed. More work to do but...yes. (detail) A bit more paint. And a scratch here and there… It feels a bit odd to sum up what I do in so few words… “Well I put on the paint with a few tools and mark into it a bit until it is finished” It can take me days, weeks, (months?)... Sometimes I experience a freedom and lightness. Most often it is intense. It is abstract and I feel like my head is turned outside in trying to reach that itch. And still I love it. The newness of every single painting I make. And then the fighting with it. And myself. Chasing whatever it is. My artistic world is currently ...

Now I have swathes of colour and a tracery of cuts and lines in front of me and the history of the piece is shaping up through numerous layers. Making the painting now will be to work over the earlier applications of colour and inevitably I end up using a large amount of white... But it feels like I have barely begun. This is a good place to acknowledge the know-how of artists Rebecca Crowell and Jerry McLaughlin and their book “Cold Wax Medium - Techniques, Concepts and Conversations”. It’s been really instructional. Their technical input along with my urge to explore ideas and dabble curiously, (ok, what can I do with cold wax medium?), has given me fresh direction and means of expression. Thank you Rebecca and Jerry! I have spoken about the mark marking process itself but a lot is determined by how wet or how dry the paint is. When cold wax medium is mixed with oils, the drying process is speeded up a bit. Some of the most subtle effects can be made when the surfa...

My painting has a good solid foundation now. It means I can build more paint on top and importantly work into the base layers to create texture and form. Scraping, gouging, cutting, scoring, scouring. Gentle rubbing. With every action the depths can be revealed - a flash of yellow, a shadow of indigo. It’s always inevitably early on in the making, that I find the urge to make scoring marks or draw in lines, almost overwhelming. Sometimes I use graphite in tablet or stick form. Sometimes I choose a scratchy bamboo pen dipped in Indian ink. I think I have said before how much I love process and where there is a process there are tools to aid me. The photo below shows the ones in near constant use. Making expressive marks is the whole point of my work. The laying on of paint can make shifts and shadows of colour appear. The scraping back and gouging of lines through layers, or the addition of graphite or ink can all create visual depth and narrative to the surface. ...

I’ve seen other artists writing about the various processes they go through to make a painting and then showing the finished piece for sale. I’ve always found it quite interesting so thought I would give it a go and show you here just what it is I do. There will be a few blow-by-blow posts with images to illustrate the development of the work as I go along. By the end of this week you will see it complete and then have the opportunity to buy it if you wish. Ready to begin then… ...take a wooden panel ...edges covered in tape to keep them clean ...three or four layers of sanded gesso to provide a smooth surface. Nothing much to see so far then... But the title is decided already - “happed in sky” - so now I can set up my palette and how I love setting up my palette! The joy of choosing which colours of oil paint to squeeze silkily out of tubes onto the glass is huge and significant. There will nearly always be Indigo, Payne’s grey, Terre Verte, Indian Yellow, Dioxazine Pu...

On any given day, I can cross the road in front of our house and travel by bus for ten miles or so to my studio, located in the small fishing town of Kirkcudbright, here in South West Scotland. The journey is predictably and reassuringly familiar, promising a non-judgemental welcome as my square key turns in the lock and reveals ever present delights within. Here I am. Breathe internal calming sigh. Light, smells, materials demanding touching. Work still in progress from last encounters. Potential. I work in various states of chaos.  Then I declare there is no space and there must ensue ordering, sorting, rebuilding of rust-printed paper piles, sweeping and rearranging. Reasoned activity offers fresh breathing rhythms.  There will be time to catch ideas and help them settle before the muddling happens again. And then there’s my chair to cocoon me offering yet more time - “to sleep, perchance to dream”. And I do sleep sometimes - delicious permitted opportunism for afternoon na...

Whether the next project is boxes, bowls or as yet half formed ideas for something yet unspoken, each requires a bit more imagining, free-form exploring, sketchbook developing and journal musing before I actually feel I am committed to a new body of work. In a way this is quite a novel way of working for me. Leaping in and seeing what happens is more my style in the studio but in the current spirit of change, I’ve been feeling the need to act like a “proper artist” and do a bit more exploratory preparation so I can at least pretend that I know what I am doing. I have started doing a bit of experimenting with encaustic monoprinting, using a makeshift system of baking sheet heated over an electric hotplate as my printing bed. Here I make marks with encaustic wax pigment bars melting unctuously directly on to the tray before laying down paper on top to make the print. It is a mesmerising and compulsive activity and indeed much paper and wax is used in just observing obsessively as the...

Now I'm launching myself off the precipice with hopeful intent - no free fall with terror this time. The studio awaits, seemingly also keen to get started on a new adventure... Where will I begin? I survey the space. Mmmm - there's a devilishly alluring gathering of rusty metal shards on the table. Some printing with them onto a variety of papers and cloth would be a fruitful use of time, I think. Ahhh - my attention is drawn to the group of encaustic bowls I was experimenting with. To make another would be a pleasing rhythmical activity, curved layers of paper and wax combining into a satisfying just right for cupping-in-the-hand structure. Ooh - but there is my collection of seen-better-days wooden boxes. Part of me can't wait to start transforming them into the still mysterious project I have named "Box". But not yet. Choice can be like change sometimes - excitingly attractive but potentially ever so scary too. What if I choose the wrong thi...

What does an artist do when unsold work starts to dominate the studio? If they were newer encaustic pieces then I might scrape the wax surface back and start again on the wooden panels. But this work predates all my encaustic explorations. Numerous highly textured canvasses, some bubble-wrapped, stacked under tables, racked against diminishing wall space and taking up shelves threaten to stifle and ensnare me by their very presence. Somehow they don’t even seem relevant to what I do now, so immersed I feel now with my encaustic work. Would I want to put them on show and say this is what I make? A craft knife rests on the edge of the table... I thought I had tidied my tools away. Just one then to see how it feels... I look down at the floor. It definitely needs sweeping again. A mound of torn, mangled canvas with wrangled staples and threads lies there. I carry three stretcher frames across the floor. I know someone who will use these. This is good and getting easier. ...

I would finish the piece I was working on then I would have a bit of a tidy up in readiness for all the new stuff I was planning to do. That was the plan. Space. I needed more space. The necessary clutter of work in progress is at once comforting and restrictive. I am oblivious as time passes and chaos creeps in like silken tendrils, first to caress reassuringly ( I am in my lovely studio, after all with my making treasures abounding), then to smother as I search with feverish frustration for that very particular paper, cloth or scraping tool amongst the mounting detritus of all that creative doing. So to do a bit of sorting and reorganising is refreshingly restorative. Open the windows, turn the music up loud. Time to breathe and get moving. Tables scraped and cleared. Tools cleaned and rehoused. Paints back in box. Painty rags pinned to wall for future possibilities. Papers, fibres and threads dealt into ordered bundles. Floor swept (stopping only occasionally to wo...

I have been away from a good place for so long. Now as I make amends and try to reconnect, I find that I have brought my fear into my studio. The result is that tentative efforts to work have been woefully far from the free and expressive place that I remembered could fire and consume me. I try too hard, forcing minute concentrations of detail into a twisted tight fist of constraint and control. This is not working and this is not helping. Me. To be free and unselfconscious is the thing. And so today, with graphite blocks and paper of different weight and texture and with anxious brain ignored, I managed to begin again. Let go and make marks. Graphite on paper. Graphite on grainy paper. And wondrously (how could I have forgotten?), graphite on beautiful, old coarse linen. Now I think I might just be able to carry on.

For the last couple of weeks I have mixed: beeswax damar resin chalk pastels India ink graphite powder carbon paper encaustic pigments silk fibres and yarn rusty metal shards torn cotton scrim paper fragments with heat from table top stove and blow torch with assorted natural hair paint brushes with various scraping, gouging and engraving devices with manipulative hands and a HUGE amount of wonder, excitement and fun This is what I made... All original pieces are 15cm x 15cm

I have been experimenting all week with my newest encaustic accoutrements and I have had such a good time! Melting, stirring, dipping, dripping, brushing, scraping, marking, embedding, rubbing, gouging. I have spent more time that was reasonably necessary smelling the beeswax and lifting still warm globules to mould with my fingers. Watching the bloom on the surface fade under the smoothing of my hand. Fusing the layers of wax to each other with my heat gun was fine when I was working on the little boards but when I progressed to the first bigger piece, I realised that I definitely needed something more powerful. I always knew I wanted a proper blow torch, although I think in my head I was confusing blow torch with flame thrower... There is a huge array of flaming tools out there! As I wended my confused way through the ranks of blow torches I worried over temperature degrees, weights, burning attachments, safety features and costs. All kinds of wild scenarios flashed befo...

With broad palette knife, thick acrylic structure paste was applied in adjoining swathes across my canvas. Next a well distressed strip of beaten mulberry bark pressed down repeatedly, making its mark and memory. Then as mirror image, the bark embedded for balance alongside its imprints and left to dry out. Paint poured and water sprayed and dropped from a height. Last thoughtful and well placed brush strokes and smudges. The marks we leave in thought and action as we move through our lives. To view more of this artwork, see it on my website here: http://www.maggieayres.co.uk/gallery/impressions.htm

I thought encaustic art was all about painting with a little electric iron and brightly coloured wax. That singular notion didn't offer enough for me to explore further with the result that a vast rich seam of gloriously sensual artistic activity passed me by for so long. I don't quite remember what led to the earth-moving moment when I looked again but I did and it did! I do remember I was left breathless when I saw work by artists such as Roberta Lee Woods and Alicia Tormey. I was enthralled and immediately set off on new travellings to unexpected and unconsidered places. There followed several weeks of gathering pieces of required paraphernalia including a little table-top stove, cradled boards, and surface thermometer. To these I added some tools I'd used for ceramics, along with carbon paper, pastels, graphite powder and India ink. My trusty heat gun would take on new fusing dimensions. I read books, looked at lots of images online and watched YouTube videos to...

"Flourish" is about letting go, allowing growth and not hiding from the world. I want it to say: "This is who I am, I'm going to fly and I am not apologising!" It taps right back into my concept of "Acceptable Flesh". (See " Not Whining But Screaming ") Oh for all of us to feel nurtured, nourished and valued unconditionally irrespective of our physical or monetary status! I suppose it is more the way I want to feel than how I am most days. Exuberantly aspirational... " When I think about how I made this piece it seems like I threw everything at it; highly textured painted canvas, fragments of polychromatic silkscreen printed calico, constructed silk fibres, dyed mulberry bark, mixed threads. And it's red, shoutingly RED! Because it had to seem bold and unapologetically blooming. Exuberantly alive. To view more of this artwork, see it on my website here: http://www.maggieayres.co.uk/gallery/flourish.htm

Creative potential at the heart of all... or The paint does it by itself... "Core" is important to me for two reasons. It was one of the first pieces I made when I moved into my studio just over two years ago, remaining in my mind as a revolutionary time. Yet more memorable still was the beginnings of a new way of working with paint that has carried me on ever since. I had been using an acrylic structuring paste for some years already that had allowed me to add texture with fibres and threads to my canvases. It was only when I started to paint "Core" that I realised how porous this made the surface as the acrylic paint (mixed wetter than usual) was bleeding out like watercolour. A door opened enticingly! I proceeded to water down my paints even more, laid the canvas on the floor and poured colour in tentative streams from above to splash and puddle and swirl. I added more sprays and drips of water to encourage movement. Quite often there was a flood over t...

There is currently an exhibition at The Artroom in Dumfries of textile work in response to the life and work of poet Robert Burns. Eight Spring Fling artists, including me, are showing work at this new exhibiting venue until February 23rd. Our pieces are so varied in both technique and style yet I think complement each other so interestingly. Gloamin Grey by Maggie Ayres Mine is called " Gloamin Grey ", taken from the poem The Lea-Rig. (Gloaming is the Scots word for twilight). It is suspended in the space and casts shadows against the wall behind. I wanted to make the hanging light and airy to evoke the magical in between time of day and night. Detail of Gloamin Grey I worked the piece using a mix of dyed silk fibres (tops, throwsters waste and laps) and merino wool tops with Solufleece dissolvable stabiliser and free machine stitching. I also incorporated some split silk carrier rods and rows of hand stitching. The Lea-rig is one of my favourite Burns' song...

Visiting the Harrogate show in terms of buying opportunities is like alighting in Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. Endless stalls of fabulous must-have, just-can't-do-without fibres, yarns, fabrics and threads. I will only buy what I need. I know what I am looking for. I have a list. I lied. I lied over and over again. But I came home thrilled beyond measure over my bag of Habu goodies. Who could resist raw silk wrapped paper and raw silk tassar yarns which make me sigh when I look at them? Raw silk tassar yarn - image from habutextiles.com Artisan tempted me with beautiful hand-dyed linen lace yarn in soft pewter, natural flax and most wondrously so so soft seaweed silk yarn in pure ivory. I was lost! For anyone who has experienced the fibre extravaganza that is Oliver Twists, well you will know what happened next... undone and beyond... Spending time indeed.