Carly Gilliatt
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My work is about the landscape around me and those moments that make me stop and pause. On a walk when I get my camera out or sit down and draw and really notice what is in front of me. In my studio, these moments are distilled and developed to capture a sense of that place and time.
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I trained in Textile Design and then became a teacher, leaving when my children were small. It was teaching that first inspired me to start making my own work; encouraging and inspiring students all day, I really wanted that for myself! I took a City and Guilds course in Stitched Textiles and spent a long time working in fabric before the expressive qualities of paint drew me in. I am now thoroughly enjoying exploring my ideas in paint and mixed media on canvas and wood panels.
This is my studio in my garden, it really is my happy place.
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I live in a village near Lincoln in the UK. Daily walks, farmers’ fields, trees and hedgerows are a constant source of inspiration. The family and the dog have got used to me lagging behind on a walk, or stopping the car to take a photo. These stimulate my ideas, they might become a landscape in my sketchbook, sometimes they just percolate in my brain and details will come out in paintings.
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I mainly use acrylics but often there is some mixed media in there as well, inks, watercolour, pastels and collage. I don’t plan my paintings they build slowly in layers, from a starting point which might be photos or drawings and sketchbooks. I love that I couldn’t have predicted the end result.
I start work very playfully and follow urges and little seeds of ideas. I pay attention to the colours, drawings, marks that light me up, focus on those and then shake things up by trying something new, a bigger brush stroke or a paintbrush attached to a very long stick. These things bring an energy into the painting, a history of marks gone before that I couldn’t replicate.
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Finding my rhythm in the studio
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“I have a blog on my website where I share stories from my studio, this is an excerpt…”
“Over the past couple of weeks I have started some new 40 x40cm pieces in my studio. This is a bit bigger in scale for me and so far I have loved it. I have also been working on the floor. This somehow feels more free and more energetic, using more of my body in the action of painting. I have been using bigger brushes, my trowel and squeegee, and noticing when things start to happen that I really like, the surprising colour when you scrape back through wet paint and the happy accidents. I was using a spoon to put white paint on my palette and found I really liked the doodles it created as the paint ran off the spoon. I decided to add those dribbles in exactly the same way to a painting and filmed myself doing it. That instagram post gained my biggest reach ever!”
Original paintings inspired by my landscape
The journey to a finished painting can be a long one, the result for me, should be beautiful with a living, breathing energy and evoke a sense of place.
Sense the breeze in the air, the sounds of the wildlife around you and the ground beneath your feet.
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‘Wandering through the bright fields’
‘The light at the end of the day’
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‘Over one more set of hills’
‘Glimpse – Cove’
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‘A sense of place’
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