Rosie Britton
Artist Portfolio
Please scroll to see range of images
Whizz through the details of my paintings on this page and you will immediately see that my art is very varied! I love paint, but I also love the magic that an iPad or a computer can create. I love landscape and buildings, flowers and gardens, but I also love abstract painting. I love colour but I also love drawing. I love being outside immersed in a landscape, but I also love messing around in the studio, cutting and tearing, and throwing paint around!
I discovered almost by accident the joys of painting with a computer and creating digital art from my drawings and paintings, using Photoshop. The computer has a will of its own, and it is often deeply frustrating to find oneself unable to do things digitally that with paint would be no problem. The reward however, is a strange world of visual imagery impossible to achieve in any other way.
First popularized by David Hockney, iPad paintings use technology in an intriguingly different way from Photoshop. The iPad's touch screen allows the digital artist a vast range of marks in an infinity of colours and provides endless scope for play and experimentation.
After playing for hours on a computer or iPad it is deeply satisfying to get ones hands dirty! Collages are immensely tactile and, unlike when using a computer, a collage maker keeps constantly on the move. The creation of the materials used is a labour of love, as important as the finished work, incorporating drawings, collagraphs, dyed and printed papers, as well as paint, inks, and found materials such as sand, seeds, feathers or pressed leaves. Gathering or creating all these things is a far cry from sitting in front of a screen.
And so to paint: whether working in oil paint, acrylic or mixed media, my paintings are built of layers that are then scraped into to reveal hints of what lies beneath. I like to juxtapose thick juicy paint and thin glazes, and I occasionally incorporate ink and charcoal. Often I paint over collage so that some of my work defies exact definition: painting or collage? At the end of the process I might decide to play with the finished work on the computer and a new creation takes shape: painting? collage? digital image?