Artist's Profile
Wendy McBride
My degree is in English, Philosophy and Art so I am probably two-thirds self-taught. Following my degree I taught Creative Writing and Painting to children with special needs. I also joined life drawing and landscape classes run by Chris Deakin at Plymouth Arts Centre. In summer we took the ferry to Mount Edgecombe and worked outside. Gradually landscape painting began to take over and after teaching and some writing it became a full-time concern.
My earliest memories are of wild places, of sea and rocks, of scratching heathered hills playing hide and seek with the sun. Maybe what I want to say was formed in this childhood, not as an idyll, more as an attempt to recover something of the pungency, the shock of first time things from their displacement in adulthood. Whatever the reason, nature in its untamed state has become central to my work. Armed with sketchbook and camera, but often just looking, I walk the coast and countryside around my home in Devon and favourite places in West Penwith and the Isles of Scilly. Each year I do a residency for the gallery on Tresco. What I hope for is not the picturesque but rather an emotional response to where I am, a resonance kthat lifts my heart. Back in the studio I think over the walk. I find some distance is helpful. The pictures start with a few tentative marks or a splotch of colour and then begin to take on a life of their own. The whole procedure becomes overlaid with misremembering and doubt, or happy accidents with my materials so that the painting becomes, for better for worse, my own creation. |
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