Terrill Welch by herself - issue #16 Absorbing Influences
Recent weeks have been punctuated by unsettled weather with heavy rain mixed with hail and gusts of winds that reveal splashes of sunshine as the clouds gallop across the sky. I haven’t been out on the trails as much as usual, preferring to be tucked in painting in the studio or researching various artists and their paintings online. There has been a show and studio tour to prepare work for and new listings to get into the inventory plus existing listings to update with new images and room views. Also, I was approached and accepted an offer to be the “artist in residence” for the Mayne Island Resort which is under new ownership.
The lobby is now full of my large and medium paintings and there are smaller works in the hallway up stairs.
As they refresh each of the eight rooms then we will put paintings in those as well. In total, the resort should be able to show between 40 and 50 paintings at a time. I think this should be a good opportunity and work well with the gallery pod.
This is idea anyway. So far we have 16 artworks on site.
In between these tasks, I have been working on preparing the yearend for my art business and taking us to Victoria for our annual health exams. The past month has had that “dug in and just get it done” feeling to it. However, the international Opulent Art Gallery in the U.K. requested to show my work in late February and now has what they requested to show my work in partnership the ARTSY platform. If you haven’t yet set up an account as a member of ARTSY you may want to, particularly if you live in the United Kingdom or Europe or from anywhere as a way to show your support for my work that is showing their by following my profile. It is definitely not necessary though because you will always get my personalized service by connecting directly with me here and in my Artwork Archive online gallery. However, below is the direct link to my Opulent Art Gallery profile on ARTSY so you can take a look and share if you wish.
The “Paint Like an Artist” student show in Victoria with the Vancouver Island School of Art opens today and is available for viewing in the Slide Room Gallery until April 5, 2024. I have three paintings in this show and there is also work by Jody Waldie and Glenda King who use to show with me in the gallery. Please call or email to inquire about gallery hours if you happen to be in Victoria during this time and would like to drop in.
The Made on Mayne Spring Tour is happening as well and the gallery pod is on the map and will be open an hour earlier from 10-4 for both the Friday and Saturday and then 11-4 daily for the rest of Easter Weekend and ongoing.
Also, I am off for a couple of days painting and reference gathering trip on Sunday to the southwest coast of Vancouver Island while David’s daughter comes to stay with David. It is the first time in a long while that I have had three days and two nights to myself to organize as my mood dictates. I will likely paint a couple of sketches but mostly gather references and wander a few of the many beaches that I haven’t had a chance to visit since late February of 2020.
I am going to do something different with this issue and resist breaking it up into titled sections which is more of a convenient organizing structure rather than how I actually work as I gather, absorb, remix, personalize and sometimes abandon influences and ideas. Therefore, this issue is all under one heading until I make a special early and extended offer on my original paintings for “Terrill Welch by herself” subscribers.
ABSORBING INFLUENCES
On the day that the February issue of “Terrill Welch by herself” reached your inbox, I went out plein air painting in the Mayne Island Japanese Memorial Garden.
It is just a small 8 x 10 inch walnut oil on gessobord work that I finished the next day in the studio and will be publicly released next Friday. I offer it here for your first consideration until then.
Artist notes: I set up quickly in the afternoon light with a warm sweater under my painting apron. The light moves fast through the trees in the gardens and clouds rolled in just 45 minutes later. I pack up the painting and my gear knowing I will have to put the final touches on this work in the studio the next day. But it is wonderful to be out for the first plein air session of the year in mid February.
Both the approach to this painting and the red bridge seem to not be able to help themselves from nodding to Monet. Yet, it is still distinctly my work in brushstrokes and framing of the composition. I submitted the work for class but now do not remember what the exercise was at the time. I generally use the courses I take as prompts to begin work I have been wanting to do anyway… such as the first plein air painting of the season and a painting of the red bridge. This ability to integrate work directly into my established painting classes is one of the reasons I like the design of the online courses through Vancouver Island School of Art. There is little-to-no separation between me, my brushes, my chosen subjects and the requests made for work. We choose our own media, our own sizes and our own content to paint. Yet, there is company in the studio, critical review of the work by peers and instructors and a mix of new historical and contemporary artists to discover and new art to view. There is all this without the extra marketing and preparations I did when I was teaching classes myself.
Take this next work and the idea of motion, lenses and technology. I started with a memory of my daughter and mother overnight kayaking trip in August 2017.
Most of the trip was warm and smooth waters.
On the return we were not so fortunate. My daughter’s call from the back of the double kayak still rings in my ears as she shouts into the wind “she can take more than that mom! Keep paddling!” She wasn’t fool hardy but rather experienced and we had already double checked that our life jackets were on securely and that the emergency radio was working and easily accessible.
The wind had picked up when we were about halfway across the bay and it was coming head on into an incoming tide. It was the same distance to go back as it was ahead and safer to just keep going. I wasn’t very experienced at kayaking at all and basically was a fair weather kayaker. However, I was strong and I knew how to paddle even with partially frozen shoulders because of her coaching the past couple of days on techniques that would work with the range of motion in my shoulders. As luck would have it, a boater was out testing an engine and came to check on us and then spotted us until we had cross the roughest water of the bay. We made it. Right side up and soaked in salt water to the skin. It was a memorable daughter and mother overnight kayaking trip for my 59th birthday. Now, every time the sea rises up on the winds close to me I think about all that water coming over the bow of the kayak and running down my glasses that are strapped to the back of my head so I don’t lose them.
As might be expected, there are no photos taken during this crossing. However, years later on a winter day, I was capture the waves at Reef Bay when the water splashed up in front of the lens.
The first thing I thought was - “she can take more than that!” This next painting absorbs both of these experiences and fulfills the assignment for painting something with motion.
Artist notes: Whether kayaking on an unexpected rough sea or just too close to the shore when the wind and sea sprays water up into the air, there is a moment where I can see clearly. Then my eyes shut with the imprint still resting on my closed lids for a split second. This is that moment.
This too is ready for your consideration and if desired, I have purchased a black wood show frame for it that is similar to the one in this room view.
Also, here is a condensed version of my acrylic painting process just in case you are curious. You may notice that the tips of my fingers are used as part of the mark making and that the underpainting was blocked in with the details of the first layer and dry before I started painting the forward splash.
I have still been going out walking and hiking but mostly shorter treks. As you may have seen on my Facebook post, the bulbs are starting to bloom.
The daffodils are particularly divine...
Then there are some favourite views…
and newly seen views in favourite places.
But what I didn’t share anywhere yet is another project I am considering starting. I had thought I would work on something to do with world peace this year but I just can’t seem to find a hook or a way into the subject other than reworking parts on the painting “My thoughts are East” from March 2022. This painting has been pulled off the market until I can get a new high resolution image of it again but it is available.
Artist notes: Hope remains as difficult and destabilizing as this time may seem. In a collage of approaches and ideas, this is my painting prayer for peace.
I also remember writing at around this time these words which feel as relevant today, a full two years later, as they did then…
If you are a praying person, today is a day to pray for peace. If you are a thoughtful person, today is a day to fill your mind with successful examples of peaceful resolutions. If you are a meditative person, today is the day to sit on your cushion and breathe in calm and breathe out fear. If you are a person who must go to war or work or for a walk, today is a day to notice each step and what it stands for. May today, as everyday, we find our inner strength and fill it with love, especially for those with whom we fear and disagree. May we negotiate this day as if it were to be our last because, for some, it will be, for others, it might be, and for all of us, it will someday be.
I reworked this painting because I desperately wanted to work on the sun in this painting and make it a clear quote by Vincent Van Gogh like I had done with the doves of Matisse and Picasso. However, I didn’t realize how many different ways Van Gogh painted the sun until I set out researching and found that they were mostly painted between 1888 and 1889.
I gave it my best and after that, the brush with my intuition still reflecting on Van Gogh, went on to add additional splashes of sunshine and brighten other parts of the painting.
But this isn’t what I was wanting to share as a current focus of interest. While I was down on the beach, I started photographing the middens that are being freshly exposed during storms in our winter high tides. Though these ancient indigenous sites are not to be disturbed they are also not protected in law or environmental acts from erosion and continue to succumb to intensifying storms and rising sea levels.
All along the shore there are various pockets of shells in middens visible.
I have taken images in different light and with my big zoom lens so as not to disturb the exposed bank. These are just a few images from my phone camera to give you the idea while I continue my research.
“Intertidal Resource Use Over Millennia Enhances Forest Productivity” research article excerpt: Human occupation is usually associated with degraded landscapes but 13,000 years of repeated occupation by British Columbia's coastal First Nations has had the opposite effect, enhancing temperate rainforest productivity. This is particularly the case over the last 6,000 years when intensified intertidal shellfish usage resulted in the accumulation of substantial shell middens. We show that soils at habitation sites are higher in calcium and phosphorous. Both of these are limiting factors in coastal temperate rainforests. Western redcedar (Thuja plicata) trees growing on the middens were found to be taller, have higher wood calcium, greater radial growth and exhibit less top die-back. Coastal British Columbia is the first known example of long-term intertidal resource use enhancing forest productivity and we expect this pattern to occur at archaeological sites along coastlines globally. Reference: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/307529251_Intertidal_resource_use_over_millennia_enhances_forest_productivity
I keep thinking about how I can approach this subject with bits and pieces of broken china or stone ware and wires and screws as well as rough loose painting strokes. I can see the finished paintings in my mind’s eye. I just have to find a few hours to give one a try. There is a contemporary story to tell here and I want to tell it!
There is very little everyday discussion about middens or even much notice given to them, even though they are often right in front of us if we are wandering our coastal beaches. I want to change this. I somehow want to paint these as an open conversation about what has been and what also might be possible in the future should we choose differently. I was reading an article by Paige McClanahan on March 3rd in The New York Times about last chance tourism and how humans use to race to be first to see a new place of wonder and that now they are racing to see many of these wonders before they are gone. I sometimes get this feeling when I am painting the arbutus trees. Or in this case, as I will be painting the middens. I will not touch them or disturb them to do these paintings because there is a sacredness that comes with observing their raw exposed beauty. As I mentioned, I do have some ideas about how I will paint them though. Here is the first study to test out those notions that is still shiny and wet at the time of photographing…
Artist notes: Winter storms repeatedly expose more than 4,000 years of Indigenous history over laid by a comparatively brief and recent settler disruption. There is a story in this painting about being witness and holding space for remembrance, observation and most significantly action by drawing attention to these middens.
I have put it a room view just to give us an idea of its size. It is available for your consideration but does need th edges painted yet.
And now for my special offer…
SPECIAL EARLY AND EXTENDED OFFER FOR TERRILL WELCH BY HERSELF SUBSCRIBER
Sometime in the summer (likely in June or July) for 20 days I will be offering a 20% savings (plus any “art collector savings” you receive because of previous purchases). However, early and extend 20% savings access is being offered to paid subscription holders to “Terrill Welch by herself” and will begin now and go until the general summer 20 days 20% is over. This means you will get a chance to consider all released works first that are or become available between now and then. How does this sound?
UNTIL NEXT TIME
As I dive deep into my painting practice I can feel small shifts in my approach that are reflected in sticking with an idea or subject longer rather than continuing to gather new references and painting in the immediate present. This in turn affects what I have to offer each month with a greater focus on actual study and painting research rather then on new landscape images. I trust that this still works for you and that you enjoy and appreciate whatever I have to offer. Do let me know however if you want more of something else included as well. That said, I hope to come home from my painting trip with some exiting new references and paintings for us to share in the April issue.
I also wanted to provide an update on the renewal process for your paid subscription. From what I have been able to determine from my own renewal, the renewals happen automatically each year. You may have noticed the payment on your credit card statement. There are no separate emails reminding you that it is coming up or acknowledging that the annual payment has been processed. Additionally, I do not see a process or procedure for implementing such systems. Therefore, my reminders, references and acknowledgment in the newsletter issues are our best way at this time to speak about the process annual renewals. So for those that subscribed over a year ago are now renewed for another year. If you ever wish to cancel your paid subscription, please let me know and I can do this for you and you will still have access to the end of your yearly subscription date. Hopefully, this works for you and if you have any questions about your paid subscription, please email me at tawelch@shaw.ca and I will do my best to answer them. Thank you as always for being part of these adventure!
I want to close this issue with a sweet less than six minute video with artist Jess Allen - “This is Now” that is about memory and symbols.
Jess Allen (b.1966) is a contemporary British artist who studied at Camberwell College of Arts and Falmouth School of Art. Jess has worked locally in Cornwall, South West England for many years attracting a loyal collector following.
She has presented multiple solo exhibitions including Like Dust, The Shadows Remain (Scroll Gallery, New York, 2023), Nobody's Watching (Blue Shop, London, 2022) and Books and Boxes(Blue Shop, London, 2021).
Other than this, I don’t really know much about the artist. I just liked what she had to say and what she was doing.
All the best as always,
Terrill 👩🎨🎨❤️
Terrill Welch
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