About Me
Hello, I’m Fiona, welcome to my website. I am an artist creating abstract paintings. All my paintings emerge from drawings. I regularly draw and sketch from the life model; drawing repeatedly, wherever I am, adds to my library of remembered marks and instinctive gestures, which enhances my own visual language. Working abstract means I can control what delicious colours I can put next to each other, I am fascinated by beautiful balances of colour and their relationship to each other.
Although my work is rooted in the figurative, I work in an intuitive way; my paintings are less about portraying exactly what I see and more about responding to what I feel. My starting point is people in places, observing the figure in its surroundings. I explore my drawings back in the studio simplifying the figurative shapes and distilling them until they are merely suggestive – adding a sense of mystery and inviting the observer to explore. Each piece explores a journey, a history, both physical and metaphoric.
Working on wood panels gives a wonderful resistance to drawn marks, I draw back into the painting again and again, scraping back areas, re-painting areas, until I feel the surface – colours, shapes, marks – are all working together. Exploring the varying viscosities of paint, creating layers through rich opaque colour and diluted washes, each piece becomes an interplay of unexpected colour moments and meetings.
Fiona lives and works in rural Scotland. She completed an Art Foundation at Byam Shaw School of Art in North London in the mid 90’s, after which she continued in mainstream work until she moved to Edinburgh in her mid-thirties where she enrolled at Leith School of Art. She has painted full-time since graduating from LSOA in 2002. When she’s not painting she is managing her flock of Lleyn sheep. She has exhibited widely throughout the UK and her work can be viewed here.
