Latest Exhibition

The Swan, photographed by Ann-Mari Johansson

I have just received  these photographs from my latest exhibition at the art society of Hallstahammar, Sweden.
Everything was extremely well arranged by the society who put a lot of work into the presentation, hanging and PR for the show. There has been lot of positive feedback from both committee members and visitors so I am very happy that the arrangement was possible.
The exhibition was also sponsored by The National Federation of Swedish Art Societies. 
At the opening my video The Swan was shown. An excerpt from it can be seen here

Visitors at the opening, photographed by Ann-Mari Johansson

Still Life

A dialogue between two pears.                                                 watercolour  39 x 47 cm                                                        © Elizabeth Tyler 2012  

The great American floral artist Georgia O'Keefe once said "I hate flowers, I only paint them because they are cheaper than models and they don't move." 

I could personally say the same about painting fruit and still life, I don't normally get inspired by this kind of subject but for once I thought I would give it a try. I ended up enjoying describing the surface of the coarsely woven fabric as a background for the soft smooth pears catching the light and casting soft shadows. 

The tablecloth is painted firstly with prussian blue and then with a thin layer of magenta.

The pears were painted with yellow before adding sap green and finally burnt sienna. 

                         

Self publishing

I'm just putting the finishing touches to my latest book about watercolour painting techniques. It's a book for people who have been painting for some time and need inspiration to take a step further to a more advanced and different approach. It has now 104 pages with 207 illustrations and has been a lot of work but it's something I have wanted to get done for several years. This e-book will very soon (hopefully) be available on the net as a downloadable pdf file. Later I will be publishing it in epub format but this involves creating a new layout which has already taken me months to do so I'll wait a while with that. Here I am checking the visual appearance of the illustrations to make sure the colours are as near the originals as possible when seen on different computers. For this I am using a stationary Imac, a Macbook, an ipad2 and my old PC laptop. The 4 different results I get from these (like in a TV shop) gives me an idea of how the appearance of the images and text can vary. I had to change the colour of the whole text from the more aesthetic light grey I had given it to almost black so that it could be easier to read on an older PC.  Some of the watercolour paintings illustrated in the book can also be seen as videos on YouTube and one of the advantages of an e-book is that you can add such links but it was only after many trials and errors with hyperlinks that everything worked. Another advantage of an e-book is that the reader can zoom in on the pictures and see them even closer than I did when I painted them. This meant that all the images had to be in high resolution. So the book is now 200MB and consequently can't be sent by email but will have to be downloaded from a server, There are apparently several solutions to this, I'll get back to that problem later.

Exhibition

From the Swedish newspaper VLT

At the moment and for the next two weeks my works can be seen at my exhibition at Hallstahammar in central Sweden. Unfortunately I couldn't be there myself for the opening but the local art society did a good job in hanging the 27 lithographs and paintings. According to the regional newspaper's art critic Birgit Ahlberg-Hyse it is unusual for the art society to choose an artist whose work consists of realistic paintings. She goes on to say that " it's easy to be moved by the beauty of Elizabeth Tyler's meticulous work" Finally she wrote: "In the lithographs she renders patterns on stones with photographic exactness and the precision is really impressive. But when she paints an old jetty over an undefined shadow or in a watercolour lets birds wade in diffuse water I find it gratifying with a more personal expression."


I can only say I am grateful to her for saying so.

"Vegetation"  lithograph 20 x 27 cm

"Footprints" lithograph 33 x 15 cm