10/06/2026
Wednesday, 10th June, 2026
PRESENTATION to the TUESDAY PAINTERS CLUB of RYE. 8th June, 2026 at St. Mary’s Centre, Rye.
ELAINE ALMOND on ABSTRACTING THE LANDSCAPE
Having only taken up the brush in 2008, what an incredible trajectory this artist has been on! A retired psychotherapist, who early on copying the Old Masters in oils … moved onwards as she tired of the various stages from copying, to figurative, and changing mediums, until settling on creating wholly satisfying, intuitive abstracts - mark-making in acrylics, inks or charcoal, abandoning oils for now because of their lengthy drying time.
Elaine Almond is fundamentally a plein air artist: not ‘inventing’ the landscape but being ‘inventive’ with it. Like many of us, she stores thousands of photos on her computer, taken while outdoors, armed with camera plus a lightweight collection of materials - charcoal, maybe a couple or 3 tubes of acrylic paint or inks and an assortment of brushes, Stabilo crayons, and other mark-making implements. While others are carefully portraying the details of the scene in front of them, Elaine has several sheets of cartridge paper laid out on the ground and, with a few broad strokes and/or splodges, roughs out the main features of the view before her. No detail at all.
Back in the studio, Elaine will contemplate the pages, maybe tearing them into pieces to reassemble in a new order to form a collage, or reducing the marks even further, literally subtracting i.e. abstracting them to a minimum. When she chooses to use colour, it’s mostly using acrylics, e.g. Amsterdam Expert – she recommends always using a good quality medium - and then, in an apparent random manner with broad, sweeping strokes, applies pure paint to the canvas, scumbling and mixing where appropriate. Elaine reminded us that unless you’re deliberately mixing paint on the canvas, a short drying time between coats is necessary to avoid a muddy mess. Her modus-operandi : to free-wheel with colour and marks, painting over, ‘feeling’ the way expressively through the process. Her brushes are big - 1” hake up to 6” decorator’s brush or even a mini-roller - but she doesn’t rely solely on them for her creations, but keeps a little stock of ‘tools’, such as a fork, pastry cutter, scraper, comb, sticks, bamboo pens, a straw, even a home-made ‘brush’ of 3 twigs tied tightly together, the rough stems close at the tip for producing wonderfully irregular lines, once dipped in paint or ink, in fact, anything that will make an interesting mark.
In demonstrating to the group, Elaine was not set on producing a finished painting, but on showing us how she will ‘free wheel’ her away along, painting over and changing her mind. Her ‘inspiration’ was a pair of plein air sketches: the objective to create the memory of the place.
1. An example of Expressive mark-making
2. Collage of extracts from various sketches
3. A selection of Elaine Almond’s artwork on display
4. Explaining the several abstraction processes from a first sketch.
5., 6 & 7. The sketches used to inspire a finished painting, and the bases for the demonstration.
8. First marks
9. Work in progress. Will we see the finished article?
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