Angela Hooton
I studied Drawing and Painting at the Glasgow School of Art (designed by the architect and designer, Charles Rennie Mackintosh), and after a career in education, I can now devote more time to painting.
My inspiration comes from the natural world – from direct observation of plants and the landscape. I also work from my imagination, creating illustrative, highly stylised and decorative images whilst still including elements from nature.
My work does include botanical illustration, working tightly and accurately; however I also derive pleasure from the use of more fluid watercolours.
For these plant studies, I work directly onto heavyweight watercolour paper with no prior drawing, allowing the individual components to emerge as I paint. I aim to record detail, tone and shape whilst retaining some of the looseness and transparency of the watercolour glazes. This process is absorbing and almost meditative.
I am interested in observing the tonal values and textural qualities created by groups of plants; it is a challenge to enable the individual leaf forms to emerge and appear in relation to each other and to the background, eventually creating a compositional whole. I was originally inspired to paint the small insignificant plants and grasses under our feet by the work of Albrecht Durer.
In my imaginative paintings, I stylise and simplify the content to provide a composition of lines and shapes, creating a decorative result. The watercolour paint is built up using glazes in order to create smooth gradients and an intensity of hue. I use plants as a foil for the ‘Girl and Fox’ who are central to these paintings. I do admire the stylistic work of artists such as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Modigliani.
