Rachel B Baynes
Dorset Artist
Dorset Artist
Perhaps it is not surprising as someone who started nursing at eighteen in the days before hoists and undertook university studies as a mature student with family responsibilities, that when after 25 years of designing and quilting for bed or wall I made the leap to painting it was the 'hard way': via several years of untutored lifedrawing.
In addition to re-training hand and eye, they increased my appreciation of curve in the clear unbroken line I had admired in 1930's book illustrations and on railway posters as a child, and the curving lines of the Dorset landscape drew me to move here in 2009. Drawing remains the base of all my pictures, including those in oil or acrylic; textured works are mostly 'drawn with the knife'.
I find exploring new materials, media and methods exciting, and though a reluctance to stick to 'rules' has limited success in watercolour, works exploring the appeal of saturated colour in inks have sold well in London and Reading as well as local shows, fill my sketchbooks and now inks colour some textured works, while others could be used for printing.
I continue to visit as many exhibitions as I can, educating myself in art history, always stimulated and inspired though often discouraged by the inadequacy of my own skills. Painters I most enjoy? hard to choose: the Fauves and the Scottish Colourists who, as David Marl says,"civilized them", Robert Bevan, Sorolla and many other early 20th century painters and printmakers.
Since beginning to draw I have seen the world, it's landscape flora and human inhabitants, with increasing delight, so the message in all my work is simply "Look! creation around you is amazingly beautiful, as a whole and in detail, sometimes unexpected or strange; look and enjoy today; it and you will not be the same tomorrow".
In addition to re-training hand and eye, they increased my appreciation of curve in the clear unbroken line I had admired in 1930's book illustrations and on railway posters as a child, and the curving lines of the Dorset landscape drew me to move here in 2009. Drawing remains the base of all my pictures, including those in oil or acrylic; textured works are mostly 'drawn with the knife'.
I find exploring new materials, media and methods exciting, and though a reluctance to stick to 'rules' has limited success in watercolour, works exploring the appeal of saturated colour in inks have sold well in London and Reading as well as local shows, fill my sketchbooks and now inks colour some textured works, while others could be used for printing.
I continue to visit as many exhibitions as I can, educating myself in art history, always stimulated and inspired though often discouraged by the inadequacy of my own skills. Painters I most enjoy? hard to choose: the Fauves and the Scottish Colourists who, as David Marl says,"civilized them", Robert Bevan, Sorolla and many other early 20th century painters and printmakers.
Since beginning to draw I have seen the world, it's landscape flora and human inhabitants, with increasing delight, so the message in all my work is simply "Look! creation around you is amazingly beautiful, as a whole and in detail, sometimes unexpected or strange; look and enjoy today; it and you will not be the same tomorrow".