Work experience with Jodi Whitby

There were many reasons why I wanted to do work experience with Jodi Whitby. I find her work beautiful and her techniques and style with regards to her landscapes is a level of skill I would like to have myself. Her use of light, texture and colour. She has also reached a realistically achievable level of success, financially and academically, and I felt she would be a great positive role-model. She manages to raise enough money for her own home and to raise her three children with the profits from her paintings, illustrations and from copyright for her images to be used on greetings cards. For me this is the ideal goal for my life and career.
 We started the day off with coffee at her kitchen table, she was very interested in my large-scale landscape paintings and sculptures that she had seen on my Instagram and liked hearing about the processes I was using to make them. We discussed what it is to be an artist, her personal battles with different painting styles and marketability when having several different looking projects on the go at once. Her illustration work is very different to her landscapes, and also the paintings used for cards have a totally different style according to where they will be used. She said she understood and had fights with herself about how to market so many different threads. I mentioned being told once I should use one name for my modern works, and another for my traditional landscapes….she had had similar ideas about her own work but decided that it is best to have all your work under one name, it all comes from yourself she said, be proud to show all the different sides of you to the world. She gave great advice and support on being true to your own self artistically. She understood my spiritual approach to art making, and she really made me feel more confident about doing my “thing” without doubting myself or allowing others to distract me from my personal processes.
We spend a lot of time in her studio, which was a large wooden cabin in the garden of her country house. She was working on a large impressionistic sea-scape. She uses sponges and rolled up cloth to make marks which was new for me to see. See helped me experiment painting on different surfaces to make the impression of water. Glass, mirrors, copper sheets. She had never got it right before, so we were kind of playing together and experimenting before she applied it to the larger work.
There were some brilliant recommendations for artist I may like, one in particular, stewart Edmondson was amazing. He paints abstract landscapes outdoors, often using soils and sands, leaving canvases in the rain before taking them into the studio to work on again. We discussed practical ways of approaching a landscape painting. She prefers lights t dark and then working light on again. She will also often paint a picture and then sand it down again, sometimes liking the sanded painting more. She also works almost exclusively with the canvas on the floor. She explained this made the paints behave in a more abstract way and the movement of the body working around the canvas helps give the work movement. She also explained that you can mix inks with acrylic paint to give whites a sheen, perfect for impressions of clouds and water spray.
 All in all it was a really amazing experience to work with Jodi. I found her practical advice really inspiring and her general advice and encouragement gave me a much-needed confidence boost! 

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