This is Janine’s second residency (it should have been her third but she had to cancel the last one due to buying a new car that broke down). Janine’s watercolour paintings involve building wet-in-wet layers to create deep tones and subtle blends. Having always lived close to the sea, her work depicts the changing light and feelings evoked in the hills, mountains and coastal landscape near my studio, where I also run watercolour classes. Since childhood she has looked to the sky and across open landscape with a feeling of wonder and vulnerability. She’s both intrigued and concerned about the mark we humans leave in the landscape, and this is reflected by the presence of field patterns and industry in recent work. She works in series around a particular place or event, making studies and taking photographs, before the final works are developed from memory and previous sketches and experiments in the series. This process gives her enough information to distill the elements which feel most charged.

A recent collaboration with her son Patrick, who is a graphic artist and musician, resulted in a short film ‘The Beauty of Incoming Rain’ which shows her painting to a soundtrack by Patrick. She wanted to create this together to share the meditative aspect of watercolour painting. It is a hugely mindful as well as technically interesting and unpredictable process, one she finds meaningful on a number of levels. You can watch the video here: http://janinepinion.com.

Janine has work in private collections internationally and poems published in magazines, anthologies, film and radio.