I spent an idyllic childhood living by the sea, scratching out giant pictures in the sand and gazing into rockpools. It offered a reality far more pleasing than anything I could find ‘back up at the house’. I became a daydreamer, influenced by beautiful landscape all around.
Memories of tall grasses, seed heads, bracken and birdsong became part of that inner world. Despite now living in an urban setting, I seek out nearby landscapes in which to daydream. Working in layers, I begin a painting with childlike spontaneity, allowing bright colours to dominate. With little care for outcome at this stage. Scratching back into wet paint feels like being back on that beach with stick in hand exploring what lies below the surface of the sand, hopeful of revealing a little bit of magic.
Gestural marks feel comforting to make as I allow a painting to evolve and rest for several days before working on the next layers. Abbreviated versions of remembered landscape dear to me start to appear, whether it’s the silhouette of seedheads in a hedgerow or garden, the pattern made by a clump of grasses in autumn or the fast-flowing ripples on an estuary tide. Dots, dashes, gouges. Patterns.
And in enjoying these characteristics, I then try to find a further shorthand for them, carving up my support into minimal elements of colour, line and careful placing of lights and darks. Working with large brushes laden with paint, allows me to move across the canvas in bold sweeps that are either kept or lost in the subsequent layer.
The element of ‘chance’ makes this process exciting and scary, as I search for a type of order amongst the chaos until a painting feels finished and I stop. This process feels like a metaphor for life. The older I get, the more comfortable I feel with the uncertainty of outcome, focusing more on enjoying the process.
Laura Cramer Autumn 2022
Laura Cramer lives and works in the UK as a full-time painter. Drawn primarily to landscape, she expresses her emotions with sparing strokes of colour and balanced, contrasting tones. Techniques learned ranging from painter/writer Yuri Koval in the 1990's when living in Moscow, to the Hugo Grenville School of Painting reflecting depth and poetry rather than "record keeping." She aims to paint freely, with rich designs, and heartfelt subjects. Drawn to the abstract, her work offers a bridge between reality and abstraction, fused with a strong sense of design and love of colour.
