Portrait Artist Forum - New member Thomasin Dewhurst

Hello - I feel very priviledged to have become a juried member of this site as you are all so very good! So I am very pleased to be here.

I am a British / South African artist who is, at the moment, living in the US. I received a B.A.F.A. with distinction in painting at Rhodes University, South Africa, and a M.A.F.A with dist. in both painting and my thesis from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. I am represented by the Everard Read Gallery in SA, the Winsor Gallery in Vancouver, Canada and the Blackheath Gallery in London, UK.

I feel I have a small foothold in the world of serious artists as I recently became a finalist in the 2006 Artist's Magazine competition.

I have been drawing and painting my whole life, inspired initially by my artist and poet mother. I am reading a lot of Willa Cather at the moment and am inspired by the way she described the American land. She simplifies and amplifies the colours and forms in a beautifully painterly way, and she has many similarities with Winslow Homer, I find, who is another early American great whose work I am avidly pouring over these days. I love his ability to put down passages of paint without hesitation or fussiness, and create an expression of his vision in such an immediate and raw way. I am striving to achieve that kind of directness in my own work, as I am finding these days that the best things happen after hours, days, weeks of frustration, and I have finally got a fluidity and have realised what it is about the subject I want to paint.

I consider myself a portrait artist because, try as I might, I cannot do a still-life (let alone a landscape) without some quite obvious reference to a human figure. So people it is.

I want to read Robert Henri again as he pushes the idea of painting without considering the results i.e. painting from feeling, instinct rather than the intellect. However, I am not sure all his efforts really work, do they? Or do they? (The last couple of sentences was stolen from Stephen Fry's "Bright Young Things" - a wonderful film, if you haven't already seen it.

I need to do some more drawings in charcoal (I haven't done that for a while), and I want to do some watercolour too. I am so used to working with oil that I feel less serious when I work in other mediums, probably because I am not as good in them. I am using a lot more colour to define form rather than just using brown (which I've used too, too much in the past). I discovered Gamblin's torrit grey, a lovely colour for shadows, but it only comes out once a year. It is made out of the remnants of all the other colours that didn't fit into the original tubes to support recycling and environmental day. I want to work more at defining form by light, as in Homer's best figurative works. And I also want to achieve a less finished quality in my paintings, but still have a sense of life and reality - i.e. I want to experiment with tone and the relationships between tone in a more abstract way.

I work 99% of the time from life.

Well, I don't want to bore you any more, so I'll post this with a picture. It is "Self-portrait as Shelmerdine", 46" x 24", oil on canvas, 2006.

I also have a website with other examples of my work.

Looking forward to hearing from you.