About…

How do you distil many many years of pondering, graft, scribbled words and big ideas down into an easy to digest ‘About’ section for your website?

Should I start with how my work is internationally collected, has been exhibited all over the UK? Or where I studied for my Fine Art degree? (Falmouth College of Art - I do so love the ocean and her many moods). Or should I start with telling you about my awesome family? (In order of size from smallest to largest - Sylvan, Orla and Marc). Or maybe I should tell you about how I also work as an Art Teacher at a local secondary school part-time, and then proceed to clamber up onto my soapbox to shout about how important the Arts are in education and how every young person needs creativity and revolution in their life!!

After much overthinking on the subject, I’m going to go with a classic question answer format, (try) and keep it simple - Who? What? How? Where? When?

Who?

Hannah Pugh - I do all the painting, all the everything really, except for my framing which is done by a wonderful local independent framer Post Art Framing and my printing, which is done by another brilliant local award winning, family firm - Iris Print. My business name is All Is Not Lost art - just a really good mantra for when you think everything is going wrong.

“All is not lost, the unconquerable will - the courage to never submit or yield.” Milton

What?

I magpie and hoard ideas, which melt together and jostle around, connecting and reforming and shouting and whispering their way onto the canvas. The places I escape to when painting are invoked from memory, imagination and words; referencing earthly landscapes, yet belonging to the realms of nowhere. All part of a larger place, which I’ve come to think of as Elsewhere.

Where’s your Elsewhere? Hopefully you might glimpse it whilst looking into one of my pieces.

For my dissertation I discovered words about the Sublime - that huge awe-inspired idea beloved of Romantics and Philosophers down the ages; their attempt at quantifying the immense terrifying beauty that can be found in our existence. How can excruciating fear and crippling ecstasy exist together? How can the abstract ideas of love and hate be completely polar and yet part of the same whole? Nothing is as simple as light and dark, above and below… If these opposites come full circle where is it that they meet - where is the liminal place? Where, is the liminal place….? The idea of liminality - a place between, a threshold, a place of ambiguity or disorientation, conjures itself up in a lot of my paintings as the horizon. Circles appear that might symbolise the cyclical nature of being, and taking lessons from Japanese art’s composition, what’s left out of the picture is just, if not more, important than what is - because the cracks are where the light gets in - obviously.

I’m fascinated by the secrets and stories that are all around us; the magic that connects us to the oceans and the earth and the skies; and all therein that lies. The microcosms and macrocosms that echo each other throughout the universe; bubbling up in the gaps and flinging swathes across an inky sky - the patterns and shapes and symbols that repeat and reveal themselves, the shadows that flicker at the everchanging edges and those big visceral feels that slap you right between the eyes and remind you you’re alive - and that that happens to be a really bloody great thing to be.

You can read and find out more about stories and words and ideas that I’ve found out about and jotted down over in the Studio Journal section. Just follow this link…

How?

I create washes and grounds on raw canvas or paper through layers of puddling, blotting, spraying, dripping and seeping concoctions of ink, watercolours and bleach, waiting with baited breath to find out how they’ll dry, as this will begin the narrative of the painting, launching it on it’s own imitable course.

Next, a delicate compositional process commences, balance being sought between space and form, light and dark. Finally the alchemical elements, the bringing to life, the light in the darkness… Gold or copper or sometimes marbled silver leaf is layered upon the ground and finishing touches are drawn upon the canvas, bringing the piece together. Artistry, science and serendipity all playing their part in equal measure.

Where?

I’d love to be one of these artists who paints and sketches out in the wilds, lashed to a mast in true Turner fashion, but I’m not. I tend to work in my Studio aka Shedio aka The Shed, at the bottom of my garden in Alvechurch, near Birmingham in the UK.

When?

You can find out where I’ll be showing my work next by following this link here… Or if you fancy popping over to the studio to have a look at something over a brew you can contact me here!

Whatever happens, thanks for being interested enough to read this far. For the occasional update on what I’m painting, thinking, reading, drawing, selling, doing (and I do mean occasional) sign up for my mailing list here x

Best,

Hannah