Rachel Cronin

This month we are thrilled to introduce you to local artist Rachel Cronin. Rachel is an abstract landscape artist, based in Banbury in North Oxfordshire, currently living in Hook Norton. She has kindly agreed to answer our questions into her artistic life. Rachel’s work has been shown at The Heseltine Gallery and was awarded the prize for the best 2D piece in our 2019 Open Exhibition for South Northants and North Oxfordshire. We are currently showing some of her new pieces of work in our online exhibition ‘In the Spotlight…' You can visit the exhibition here. Thank you, Rachel, for sharing your art path with us here!

HOW DID YOU BECOME AN ARTIST RACHEL?

I’ve wanted to be an artist pretty much all my life. One of my earliest memories is of being at primary school and trying and failing to mix the exact shade of blue I needed to paint bluebells. I got told off for wasting too much paint and paper. I sometimes veer off into other occupations, but I’ve always come back to art. I’ve worked in a bookshop and I’ve spent many years working for art charities and arts organisations helping to facilitate other people’s creativity. I still teach adult art classes as it’s something I really enjoy. I do not want to teach people to paint like me, I want them to paint like themselves. I like to think that I help them unearth their own voice and style at the same time as showing them how to navigate composition, tone, and colour.
I graduated from art college in 2001. In the UK in 1998 education, for the most part, was still free. I managed to secure a grant for my first year of studying and my tuition fees thereafter were tiny. As much as I loved painting, my main reason for attending art college was that I wanted to join a band and I wanted a boyfriend. I had been told that art college was the way to do this. I decided that Hull, with all its post-war architecture and northern grit (and cheap booze) was the place for that. I still can’t actually play an instrument or sing but I can paint. The boyfriend is long gone and happily married to someone else, but the need to make art has remained. I studied art in the years that followed the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy. I don’t think painting has ever been so out of fashion, but I stuck at it even though many a tutor tried to prize my fingers off my paint brushes. They have been my loyal companion for over twenty years now and the urge to capture the bluebells is still there.

WHO OR WHAT INSPIRES YOUR ART?

For inspiration I look everywhere. I can listen to a piece of music, read a book or an article and decide I want to make a painting about what I have just discovered. I have artists that I love like Kurt Jackson, Ivon Hitchens, Peter Lanyon and David Tress as well as Georgia O’Keeffe (responsible, in large part, for my unreadable and dry university dissertation but let’s not hold that against her), Joan Eardley and a hundred artists I’ve forgotten or haven’t discovered yet. I love the way Sharon Blackie and Robert Macfarlane write about the landscape and imagine, as many artists do, that I am in a never-ending and constantly unfolding conversation with these people through my work.

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO ANYONE WANTING TO PURSUE ART?

The advice I would give anyone wanting to pursue art as either a career or a hobby is not to wait for permission, not from the world or your parents or those random people whose opinion you have decided matters- the culture isn’t set up to benefit creative people, you are almost certainly not going to thrive in a system designed to put profit before whimsy, nature, beauty, passion and those eternal and lovely conversations. Give yourself permission and go and find the people who will help you grow and live the way you want. If you do decide to throw your lot in with the creatives, prepare yourself for a wonderful ride.

The Future Has an Ancient Heart, Rachel Cronin

WHAT IS YOUR CREATIVE PROCESS?

I make abstract landscape paintings in response to the seasons and the landscape around me. They are mythical, historical, and imaginary as well as figurative and grounded in reality. I paint both from memory and from my sketchbooks (my tutor from college would be so happy to read this) and I often have three or four paintings on the go at any one time. When it comes to my creative process, it’s quite simple: I try really, really hard. It’s embarrassing how hard I try. I never settle for a piece of work that’s just okay; I keep going until it says what I want it to say and seems to evoke the feeling that I want it to evoke. I’m aware that once a painting is finished, it isn’t really mine anymore- it’s waiting for that forever-person to come along and recognise something of themselves or their experience in the work.
I usually begin with an underpainting, something expressive and quick that gets colour down on the surface (I work on wooden boards, canvases would disintegrate under the kind of punishment I dish out). I am aware early on of what colours I want peeking through later layers, so these are the first ones down. I also write all over those first layers. Scrawled bits of poetry, song lyrics, spells, and symbols. Once this part is dry, I begin to work on a more recognisable landscape and with a colour scheme that I’ve pre-chosen. I find this stage can be equally as exciting as I constantly wipe paint back or scrape at it with a Stanley knife blade. Sometimes a decent composition or painting arrives early on, but it will feel too flat, too easily arrived at. That ease deprives the work of its history, I want the struggle and the victory to be visible to the viewer in the texture of the paint. The final stages are my favourite part, the tiny marks, the leaves, fenceposts and scratches and barely visible glazes. I can spend weeks finessing something that was essentially complete a while ago.

WHAT ACTIVITY DO YOU RECOMMEND TO SPARK THE ART?

When I’m stuck and don’t know how to start, I grab some charcoal, some black ink, a brush and a few mark making tools, like a stick or a cut-up credit card. I use my non-dominant hand and I try not to look at the paper. I just simply draw. I aim for a jumble of verticals, horizontals, and diagonals as well as dashes, and areas of dark and light. I time myself, usually only giving myself 5 minutes, 10 at most. When these studies are dry, I cut them up and rearrange them looking for interesting compositions. I ask myself whether I ‘like’ something and if I do, I try and work out why that is. It’s an exercise that helps to develop my critical thinking as well as provide me with a few starting points.

If you would like to contact Rachel about her work, you can do so on instagram @rachelannecronin

Meet the Artist - Rachel Cronin