Artwork,photos and research by Natalie Göhrt

[natalie-megan]

Diane Wright

Diane Wright is an artist who uses graphite pencils to create landscape sceneries, she creates sceneries of rivers, forests and other landscapes like that. In 2002 she started to pick up her drawing again after 20+ years of creating, before 2002 she was on a break to spend time with her family and to build up her career, at University she progressed into getting a bachelor degree in fine art. By using black and white graphite, she believes the drawings have such a timeless quality to them and even though she has begun to explore more mediums, she believes that graphite will always be her favourite to work with.

Diane’s work encourages me to step out of my comfort zone to try and make more landscape pieces, recently I have only been working on plants and animals instead of working on certain sceneries, however I plan to work on sceneries in the near future to explore more mediums and to explore different techniques.

[natalie-megan]

Bev Lewis

Bev Lewis studied at the Johannesburg School of Art in South Africa, this is where her career in graphics started, she discovered her first love for animals in art in the early 90′s where she bought coloured pencils and started to draw her love for the wildlife. Currently Bev uses coloured pencils, graphite pencils and pastels to create animals that inspire her, in the beginning she found inspiration from birds and small animals that made her feel happy, over the years her love grew and she moved onto drawing even bigger animals.

Personally I usually use sharpies, paints or charcoal to create my own animal pieces, however Bev’s work makes me want to try and use coloured pencils more in my work, in the near future I want to try and make more vibrant pieces like Bev’s work to build up my skills so that I can sell commissions in the future.

[natalie-megan]

Aimee Rolin Hoover

Aimee Rolin Hoover found her inspiration to sketch wildlife at a young age, she started by sketching animals in her sketchbook and if she wasn’t inside doing that then she was outside trying to befriend a local animal, she is passionate about bringing wildlife to life in the world and she paints and draws portraits of animals. As she got older, Aimee became more famous and started a 13 year old career in drawing people’s pets as portraits, her fame grew from there and she now uses acrylic and oil paints to create these cute pet portraits.

I love how her work looks especially with the charcoal, I enjoy using charcoal myself therefore the fact that she uses charcoal to create wild life makes me happy and it helps me think of more ideas for future themes, it also teaches me how to use my charcoal sticks to create different markings for animals.

[natalie-megan]

Jonathan Pointer was born in 1974 and as a child lived in the Middle East, where exotic birds and the back-drop of desert, provided an early stimulus in what has since proved to be a lifelong passion for nature and the great outdoors. Jonathan’s inspiration is Victorian art and he enjoys taking photography of the animals he catches such as owls, hedgehogs and other earthly animals. Currently Jonathan is living in West Wales with his artist wife, they both live around a huge forest with a lot of wild life in.

To create these works, Jonathan uses a pencil to sketch the animals out and he studies into them after travelling from place to place, I find his work inspiring and it makes me want to take photography of my own animals around me such as birds and hedgehogs,his work also inspires me to sketch out owls. Linking to my own work, his work is quite helpful especially when he studies into the creatures, it makes me think that maybe I should study into the animals as well.

[natalie-megan]

Van Gogh

Vincent Willem van Gogh was a Dutch Post-Impressionist painter who posthumously became one of the most famous and influential figures in Western art history. Throughout his decade, Vincent created around 2,100 works, including 860 oil works. Vincent was born on the 30th of March in 1853 and he died on the 29th of July in 1890, the period he was in was Post Impressionism and Neo-Impressionism. After Vincent passed away, he was known to be one of the most recognized painters of all time, and he had an obsession with sunflowers.

The sunflower paintings had a special significance for Van Gogh, they presented gratitude to him and the first two paintings of sunflowers were hung in the room of his friend, the painter Paul Gauguin, who came to live with him for a while in the Yellow House.

In my opinion his paintings were beautiful and eye catching, it made the viewer feel pleasant and in a way I feel like this was his way of painting out his obsession so it didn’t get out of control in reality, meaning he didn’t have a whole land of sunflowers, instead he portrayed them in paintings and hung them up for decoration.

[natalie-megan]

Anya Gallaccio

Anya Gallaccio is a British artist who focuses on site-specific, minimalist installations and often works with organic matter. The idea of her work is to collect natural found objects and to create a piece with them, after creating such a piece she slowly watches her creation decay and transform in the environment it has been put into, this means that even she is unable to predict the ending of her sculpture, and that is what makes her sculptures unique and meaningful.

Back in my studio I have created a small canvas of living leaves, I took inspiration from Anya to watch my leaves decay because I came up with the idea of life and death, I thought by creating that little canvas it would help my group understand my process of my piece, in the end even I am unable to see what the ending will be for my leaves, just like Anya is with her work. 

By looking at her work, I feel inspired to create more living pieces that slowly decay from the warmth or the cold surrounding them, I think this process is quite intelligent and exciting.

[natalie-megan]

Katerina Apale

Katerina Apale is a painter who uses media such as acrylic and oil paints. She started her artistic journey through her training at the Art Academy in Litvia, her mother was known to be an artist as well which is where Katerina found her inspiration, almost as if she wanted to follow in her mothers footsteps. During the course of her agree, Katerina travelled to Berlin to the University of Arts on an exchange program, she completed her degree in 2008 and obtained a Masters in Fine Art. 

Throughout her life, Katerina travelled to Australia and found inspiration by the shapes of the birds, flowers and ornamental patterns. She found these subjects quite beautiful and wanted to portray them in her own work somehow. When it comes to painting, she enjoys using acrylic and oil paints to catch a joyous and unique richness of colour in Australia Nature.

To me her work is floral and precise, it catches the beauty of the outside world and opens the audience’s imagination to a whole new world of beauty. Her work makes me want to create more floral pieces with brighter colours to catch that joyous feeling and richness, I thought she was a good pick for my current theme because I am surrounding my ideas with nature and beauty.

[natalie-megan]

Sean Briggs.

Sean was born on the Pennine hills of West Yorkshire where his love of nature developed, currently he lives in a small village in Buckinghamshire along with his family and his main focus is sketching out animals and country side buildings as you can see above, he mainly lives near the countryside or in it however he has stuck close to London so he can carry out more work and progress. Sean creates work to portray catching a moment in a fluid and unconstrained manner, he tries to help his audience feel some sort of emotion towards his works. The media that this artist uses is graphite, watercolours and ink on paper, and to top all of it off he digitally edits it for preparation for the end.

I see many houses that look similar to his drawings around me, I live in the countryside therefore I can relate to his sketches quite a lot. I’ve seen multiple countryside animals such as foxes, mice and rabbits, his work makes me feel at home in a way and it makes me want to go on a walk to catch some amazing photography with some of the animals on my journey. Sean’s work makes me want to sketch my own animal pictures like he does with the graphite and watercolour, then I could maybe print my works out to stick up on my art board to present to my group, I think by researching into Sean’s work it will help my build up my skills with watercolours and printing.

[natalie-megan]

Suzie Marsh.

Suzie Marsh went to Brighton and Exeter colleges to study the course art, she obtained her degree in ceramic sculpture in 1982 and in 1986 she established her own workshop, from then she has become well known for her animal sculptures which are based in the UK and worldwide. This artist feels inspires by the animal character and the form of the animal, she feels inspired by life and through constant observation of her own unique animals. As you can see Suzie focuses creating cat sculptors a lot, she has become an acknowledged leader in the portrayal of the domestic cat and she now produces a large range of cat sculptures at her studio in Cornwall.

I feel very inspired by Suzie’s work seeing as she has a huge space in her heart for cats, I myself have two cats at home and I’ve mostly had cats all my life so far, therefore I feel connected to her work in someway because I favour cats so much as much as she does, the thing that makes me feel happy about this artist is that she donated a percentage of each of her cat sales to the Cats Protection League, this just shows how big her love is for this specific animal. For further work, I feel the need to paint a portrait of my two cats at home and then present them to my group in University. The media I want to use is acrylic paint to complete my portraits however, if I am able to buy more clay then I might feel motivated to create a cat face to link back to Suzie’s work seeing as she uses clay in her works to create these wonderful sculptures, she also pewter and hot foundry bronze to create these metallic looking sculptures. 

[natalie-megan]

John Constable was an English landscape painter in the romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham. Born in 1776, John’s main focus was painting natural landscapes that represented the nature around him, he used thin homemade card to paint on and he used oil paints for media, and John’s style for painting was Romanticism. Sadly John passed away in 1837 in London, however his paintings have been auctioned around the world and have been sold to various sellers. 

From my view I can see that he uses certain strokes with his paintbrush, this is educational for me because when I paint I usually do only two or three different kinds of strokes, but in my own recent work I have learned to add more patterns into my pieces to make them seem more professional and presentable, usually I like my paintings to seem clean and organised, therefore a recent workshop I completed at University helped me understand the different processes and materials I could use in painting to help me build up my own techniques. In John’s pieces, I can see that he uses very dark colours to paint certain aspects of his paintings which makes me see that he is quite expressive with the dark side of the palette, instead of the brighter side. The only brightness I see in a painting so far is the rainbow over the building, however even that rainbow is quite dark compared to other rainbows that I see in other paintings, although that could just be his sense of realism.

[natalie-megan]

Katsushika Hokusai is a Japanese artist who focuses on creating traditional Chinese and Japanese paintings. He was known as the painter and printer of the Edo period, Hokusai was originally born in 1760 in Edo, and he passed away in 1849 in Tokyo Japan. Katsushika is best known for painting Chinese paintings, and is also best known for his woodblock print series Of Mount Fuji, which includes the piece ‘The Great Wall Of Kanagawa’. 

This historical artist uses traditional Japanese and Chinese ink to create these beautiful masterpieces and he tells a story through his paintings, almost like an illustration does in a way. ‘The Great Wall Of Kanagawa’ tells a story of three men who travel over the unstable ocean to reach the opposite coast In the Shimosa Province, it is meant to represent how irresistible and powerful mother nature is against humans, and is practically representing how weak humans are against nature. The dark ink colours make the ocean seem more intimidating because the men are unable to see what exactly is below them lurking in the deep waters, and its almost like the white ink is grabbing at the men to drag them under and drown them, this piece seems very beautiful but in a way it is quite horrific and dark. Hokusai enjoyed painting landscapes therefore he is originally known as a landscape artist, I take inspiration from his works because I enjoy how colourful they are and how meaningful they are, paintings that tell a tale or a story make me feel interested and my attention is instantly grabbed because I want to know more about the story behind these horrific or honourable paintings.

[natalie-megan]

Brian Mock. Brian Mock is a sculpture artist who focuses on making a range of different sculptures using recycled materials. He spent his young life drawing, and much of his adult life painting and wood carving. Back in the late 1990s, Brian found his creative passion by using recycled metal to create these unique sculptures, his work was made to encourage view engagement and to emphasize resourcefulness. Brian's work to me is quite special because he uses recycled metal that has been thrown away to create something unique and passionate, instead of littering the metal he decides to make something that will be useful for him and for the viewers around him.

I quite like how he creates animals using the recycled metal because in the modern day now, littering causes animals harm and I feel like in a way he is expressing that through his work by using something that is harmful to create something beautiful and meaningful. I can see on Brian's site [ https://www.brianmock.com/ ], that he focuses on creating animals mostly which helps me believe that is likes to focus on wild life more than figurine statues and historical statues.

From my view I can see that Brian uses references from live animals to create these masterpieces, almost as if he has involved some sort of photography into his works to copy from them and to bring them to life using these sculptures. I like how Brian creates sculptures that focus around house pets and onwards to wild animals, it gives me the idea that he is expressing that recycled materials could also hurt our house pets if we litter them around, and it makes me think that he is questioning his audience by asking, "Why not use your litter to create something useful? Instead of throwing it around to harm the innocent animals and environment?", I think that question is quite impactful and it helps the viewer think and helps them feel inspired and motivated to pick up their litter and protect the animals around them.

[natalie-megan]

Claude Monet was a key figure in the impressionist movement that transformed French painting in the second half of the nineteenth century. Throughout his long career, Monet focused on landscape paintings and leisure activities of Paris, throughout his success Claude realized he enjoyed painting landscapes, portraits and seascapes. To start with a unique piece, Monet focused on his surroundings for the landscapes, and asked people surrounding him to sit down or to get into a certain position so he could paint them as a portrait. When it comes to his landscapes, they travel from France all the way to London, Monet didn't just focus on his surroundings in France, he expanded his imagination and gained fame through travelling and presenting his works.

Monet focused on natural light forms through art as well as capturing light through his pieces,his usual media was oil paints, however in certain art pieces he decided to use pastels and he always made sure to carry a sketchbook around wherever he travelled. Usually when I paint for a theme, I would use acrylic paint, however after observing Claude's work, it makes me want to try using oil paints because his works are masterpieces and they are beautiful, every detail is caught in every aspect of the paintings and it helps my own imagination expand, it makes me want to travel to new galleries or perhaps new parks to photograph certain objects and natural forms, then I could create paintings based off of my photography by using oil paints and canvases.

[natalie-megan]

Enrique Martinez Celaya who was born in Cuba, Nueva Paz, is a contemporary artist who focuses on photography, painting and sculpturing. Born in 1964, Enrique is currently 57 and he went to Cornell University along with the University of California. Throughout his career, Enrique decided to focus his work on religion, philosophy and he wanted to relate his work to his love for poetry.

The look of his paintings are quite vibrant and they clearly relate to a lot of nature environments, I like how he uses the paint to create different swirls and curves with the brush to show the difference between his works and to express the different techniques he has learned. I really like how he uses dark paints to create an eery background for one painting, but then on another painting he uses brighter colours to help the dark object stand out to catch the viewers main attention.

This last image makes me feel warm but then again it makes me feel sympathetic towards the deer because the colours used are very warm and vibrant, and they seem welcoming, however on the other hand the colours are actually representing a dangerous fire that is harmful towards animals and humans, therefore I feel a mix of emotions for this painting and it makes me want to help the deer in some way. The painting also reminds me of the Australian bushfires because of the fire and the burned trees in the background, I can see that Enrique used different turns and curves with his brush for the deers pelt which makes me feel more inspired to use that technique in my future paintings.

[natalie-megan]

Arancio is interested in the aesthetics of the natural world and its connections. Through clay, he translates his close observations of geological and environmental phenomena into sculptures which are reminiscent of occultist and sci-fi artefacts. Through working with clay, Arancio has learned that it is a liberating experience, his work is meant to resemble a healing area for his visitors to clear their stressed mind, almost as if his works are some sort of machine, or perhaps a spa machine?.

At first Salvatore's work seemed a little crude to me in certain images, however once I researched into him a little more, I found out that he enjoys creating sculptures that relate to gardens and nature. Some of his sculptures seem unusual and strange, they don't seem like objects that you would place into your garden, or even in the natural environment, however the more I observe his sculptures, the more I see the markings of plants and trees, such as the markings of moss or the bark of a tree trunk. The green of his sculptures could possibly symbolize the colour of plants and moss? A few of his sculptures also seem like rocks to me, and I believe most of his sculptures are made out of clay, which is pretty interesting to me because at first glance I thought it was some sort of pottery from the way his sculptures shine and stand out. I want to try and put more detail into my sculptures after observing Salvatore's work, instead of focusing on making plants and trees, I want to try and make a rock out of clay and carve the details of the rock into the clay, just like Salvatore has to create that alien looking object.

[natalie-megan]

Caroline Achaintre currently is a mixed media artist based in London, and her work mainly focuses on Primitivism and Expressionism. Born in December 1969 in France, Caroline is currently 51 years old,part of her education would be the Chelsea College Of Art. Caroline uses paper, textiles, leather and ceramics for materials to create a range of sculptures and when it comes to expressionism, she focuses on German Expressionism, through this she creates sculptures that express humor and something theatrical. Her pieces often incorporate anthropomorphic features, and masks which create a voodoo feeling, or maybe even a tribal feeling?.

These four images express Caroline's work that she has produced and expanded, they are seen as theatrical and mysterious pieces, making me think that Caroline enjoys producing creepy yet dramatic pieces, to me she seems like an expressive artist who isn't afraid to represent her imagination towards her audience. The masks remind me of tribal clans, in movies and in real life I have seen people wearing masks that are similar to Caroline's work, to be honest the masks make me feel a little weirded out because it seems like the masks are staring right back at you, almost as if they have something to say. On the other hand, her sculptures that are made out of paper remind me of jellyfish because of the strings that hang low beneath one of them, it makes me feel less creeped out because I find jellyfish to be very cute, however by looking at her work I can see now that she is very expressive and that her imagination is quite wild and vibrant. Personally I am not very good at sewing, therefore I wouldn’t be able to create a fabric piece such as Caroline's masks, however I want to try and create a small sculpture using paper just like she does, maybe I could try and create a tree or perhaps a trunk out of paper?.

[natalie-megan]

Phoebe Cummings was born in Walsall England in 1981, currently making her 40 years old today. Phoebe's main focus is creating sculptures that relate to nature, her use of media is unfired clay, wood and wire and her past education is Brighton University in 2002, moving onto the Royal College Of Art in 2005. The artists main focus is blooming flowers, recently her work has evolved around petals and buds.

Her current website would be http://www.phoebecummings.com/.

I really find Phoebe's work to be quite inspiring, I use clay a lot to make sculptures and my main focus through this project is to create natural objects by using clay, just like Phoebe, therefore I researched into her to focus on the detail and the markings of her sculptures to try and put her skills into my own work. The difference between mine and Phoebe's sculptures is she uses unfired clay, whereas I use airdry clay to create my own pieces. I find her work helpful because I am focusing on my own environment that has plenty of natural objects involved, therefore I feel inspired to create more objects using clay just like she does, usually I don’t focus on the detail of plants and trees when I'm sculpturing, but Phoebe has made me feel motivated to add more detail into my work to level up my skills.