This week’s featured artist is Vivien Blackburn, an art teacher, printmaker and painter from the UK.
I found a wide variety of paintings on her website, including a wonderful series of flowers, many landscapes and even some abstract paintings—but out of all of that, I was most captivated by her beautiful depictions of the sea.
Vivien Blackburn’s seascapes have all the movement and motion of the real thing. You can actually feel the swirling tide and the rolling waves in each piece.
She also picks fantastic scenes to paint, with jagged coastlines or meandering beaches to create extra interest.
One of her seascape series is entirely made up of tall, narrow paintings like the three below. They depict the different “faces” of the ocean, showing fair weather beside cloudy skies, and contrasting wintry waves with summertime seas.
Vivien always displays the paintings from this series in groups of three, five, or seven. She states that her goal is to convey a feeling of time, and I think she succeeds in doing so.
When viewed this way, each painting is like a rhythmic pulse of similar shapes and colors—enough alike to link them all together, but different enough to show progression and change.
And of course, by using that tall crop, Vivien managed to abstract something familiar that we’re used to seeing a certain way (horizontally) and made it visually new again.
If you have a chance today, take a look at Vivien’s website. There’s a lot more there than just seascapes, as I mentioned before, and all of it is really good.
You can also keep up with Vivian’s current gallery showings and recent paintings at her art blog, vivienb.blogspot.com.