Summer in St Ives By Fiona Carver

Fiona Carver
Summer in St Ives
Original Contemporary Painting
Oil on Panel
Image size: H 11cm x W 16cm
Framed size: H 24cm x W 29cm
Sold in a hand painted wooden frame
(Please note that in situ images are purely an indication of how a piece may look).

Summer in St Ives is an original oil painting by Fiona Carver. This impressionistic landscape painting depicts the view of a sunny summers day in St Ives, Cornwall.

Fiona Carver is a painter and printmaker from the Rutland/Leicestershire border. She trained at Edinburgh College of Art graduating with a BA (hons) in 1999 and now creates contemporary oil paintings and linocuts of the land and sea.

She is interested in capturing an impression of a place, the atmosphere, colours and emotion experienced at that time. Her paintings are completed mostly ‘en plein air’ meaning they are painted outdoors, usually in one sitting. That way she can capture the light and weather, getting the brush marks down before it changes. The challenges of painting in wind or rain, with moving subjects and changing views adds to the exhilaration of finishing a painting, stepping back, stretching and absorbing what is on the canvas.

The process of creating a linocut makes a nice contrast for Fiona with it’s slow, methodical planning. She cuts multiple blocks for each print, one for each colour, and layers them to build up the image. She usually has a good idea of what the finished piece will look like but this can change as the image progresses and Fiona will often adapt it as she goes along. She is interested by the process of etched lino and experiments with this to create texture and energy in her practice.

Size: H:24 cm x W:19 cm

Fiona has been creating things since she was a tiny girl when her grandmother would encourage her to draw elaborate chalk pictures on her kitchen floor. She went on to study Design and Applied Arts at Edinburgh College of Art, graduating in 1999. Here she combined her love of drawing and painting with three-dimensional disciplines such as furniture and ceramics. She now pursues this interest in both flat and more hands on work through lino printing, enjoying the different stages of drawing, gouging lino and inking up and printing which she does with her antique cast iron press. She is inspired by the simplicity of old seaside railway posters as well as the atmosphere created by costal artists such as Sir Kyffin Williams and printmaker Robert Gilmore. Her prints have a nostalgic feel with the clear lines, compositions and colours evoking memories of particular British coast lines.