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Fiona Shaw
Artist
"West Meets East" is what I call this collection of pictures.
I discovered the joys of painting in my early twenties, while running a pre-school playgroup. Before clearing up each day, I would sit at a miniature art easel and experiment with paint, which inspired me to join an art class.
After three decades of intermittent watercolour painting, I was drawn to the study of Japanese inkwash. As a meditator, I had always resonated with this style of art, with its minimalist approach, where space is as important as the brush strokes, emanating a sense of calm. I was delighted to find that the technique included a full minute of meditative stirring of the inkblock before applying the fast, focused flicks of the brush, which can be either bold or subtle.
Then in 2011, I inherited the oil paints of my late father, an accomplished amateur artist (and cousin of the prominent Edinburgh artist, the late Sax Shaw). Immediately, I fell in love with the richness of colour and texture of oils and have mainly used this medium ever since. However, recently I have also been exploring the potential of inkpen with coloured washes - and so the creative journey continues....
Brought up in the North of England by Scottish parents, I now live in richly bohemian Brighton and divide my time between painting, enjoying nature and lapping up the local culture...
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