For the first part of my residency at Merz I explored the countryside around Sanquhar including the woods along the Euchan Water, a burn about two miles outside the village. The weather was not warm enough to sit out for long so I mostly took photographs and made videos. Back in the studio I did a series of painting studies from the photographs working quickly to get the essence of the remembered images. Two works ( no 5 & 6 in the gallery above) combined painting from memory and using tracings from images on my Ipad. The tracings were created with henna tattoo bottles and florescent yellow paint which I used to trace from the Ipad onto acrylic film. The yellow tracings were then superimposed onto the paintings. Tracing images in this way was a way to consider the parallel universe of photographs I was taking and helped me explore how they could be introduced into more gestural memory paintings.
Below are some of the images from the Euchan Water which were used in creating the painting studies above.
