In review: Stoney Parsons’ demo in semi-abstract landscapes

Bringing feelings and emotions into painting
​Stoney Parsons is a contemporary, semi-abstract landscape artist who, by her own admission, tends to live a little dangerously when she paints. Although she starts with a subject idea in mind she never quite knows what will come out on canvas because she often paints scenes from memory, as this helps to keep her painting loose and free. Crucially, she paints what she sees, feels and her reaction to it, which makes the outcome unpredictable. 

​Having been a professional stained glass artist for 35 years her love of decorative art remains dear to her so she always looks to put some of her design effects from stained glass into her paintings. 

​This demo to members and guests of Lacock Art Group in October gave a unique, delightful insight into Stoney’s approach and process to achieve abstraction. This centres on trying to bring her thoughts (conscious and unconscious), feelings and a spiritual sense of the subject into her work, evoking a feeling of space in the landscape she’s portraying. 

​For the demo she painted in acrylics and used a few of her own photos for reference, as a security blanket, she says. Stoney says she also paints a lot in watercolour and in oils, which she thinks are wonderful to work with. Semi-abstract painting is about reduction, finding ways to paint landscape that’s simple but also complex at the same time, Stoney explains. You can find out much more about her work on her website.

Stoney was happy to answer questions from the audience. “What’s the inspiration for this painting?” asks one of our members. “I don’t know yet, is the honest answer,” she says. 

Equipment improvisation
Stoney uses a professional series of acrylic paints, often using a limited palette. She tends to use a lot of white, plus Nickel Azo Yellow, Carbon Black, Burnt Umber, and Viridian. Blues include Manganese Blue Hue, Phthalocyanine Blue, and Prussian Blue Hue.

Stoney Parsons

Paints, cutlery and pliers

For a palette she uses a metal dinner tray lined with grease proof paper. Amongst her regular kit is a roll of blue paper towel, the Scott brand, which is more expensive than others but more robust and behaves more like a rag than paper. It takes paint off but doesn’t leave a texture on the painting. 
​
She is a fan of rubber paint brushes and often works with them. The art materials website, Artesaver, sells a range of these. Stoney also uses a silicone pastry brush. In fact, she has an eclectic assortment of art equipment including many DIY decorating tools as well as cutlery, for example a dinner fork and a wallpaper smoother (at least, I think that's what it was)! “The B&Q painter!” she joked. She also tends to use long brushes, an influence from oil painting. More usual tools include a credit card, a spray water bottle, and a hair dryer.

Techniques demonstrated
Surface-wise, for the demo Stoney used a plywood board sealed with a gloss medium and painted all over with Jesso and white acrylic paint. She starts by painting clouds and the sky, mixing one of the blue paints with white. With watercolours if you want white in your painting you don’t put paint on the area to be white and you get into the habit of doing that, she says, so she tends to use this approach even when using acrylics. 

Sky

Hills

,Next, she moves onto paint the hills and ground in the middle distance of the scene, in a pale green colours, in sweeping brush strokes. She takes another question from the audience: “What stops you from doing the same stroke each time?” “You have to add differences, different strokes, in different directions, to keep it fresh and interesting,” she explains, as she moves on to paint the foreground that includes an expanse of water. As she works at times, in places on the painting, she takes the entire paper roll and rolls it over the wet paint, to remove paint slightly or to smudge it. 

Foreground

Rubbing off with roll of paper towel

Evoking calm, living dangerously
​Stoney asks the audience what her painting evokes for them. For a couple of us it reminds us of special places where we’ve walked, or been on holiday, and overall we collectively agree that her painting imbues a sense of calm in us. We realise this isn’t surprising when she tells us how she has painted for hospital patients in the past so had to create art with a peaceful, harmonious feeling to it, responding to the patients’ brief and what they needed - calm, air, and a sense of space.

Back to the painting. Stoney works on the foreground by adding bold dark green paint, and sprays it with water making it drip down the board. Impressively, they look like pine trees. Stepping back to look at the painting she decides the bright green trees are too bold and sets about resolving this. You can sand down the surface to soften and mute the colours, or you can blend them. Blending colours with acrylics is harder than blending oil paints because they dry faster, sometimes before achieving a very gradual gradation. 

She decides she needs to get depth into the painting, and uses tape to do this. Using a set square to position it she sticks a line of tape down the middle of the group of trees, then applies white paint along the edge of the tape before peeling it off. She rubs off some of the paint from the trees to the right of the tape with paper towel. This gives a blurry effect. 

This, says Stoney, is a scary moment because you don’t know what the result will be. But you have to get out of your comfort zone, she adds, you have to live dangerously, and live life to the full. Otherwise you get stuck doing the same thing over and over again and don’t grow. A maxim for life in general! 

Applying tape

Adding depth

She uses the tape technique once more on the left hand section of the painting, producing the effect of a shaft of light stretching from sky to ground. It works! The tricky thing is to make it look loose and random, abstract but to do it with control. She says she’s naturally a very tight painter so constantly works to be looser, which is not easy.​

​It’s important to paint sustainably, by which she means find out what you like to do and do that, so that you continue to enjoy your art and don’t get fed up. 
Stoney says she didn’t know what she was going to paint at the demo, it just took shape and came out as the evening progressed. As you can see from the photos, the end result is a beautiful landscape painting.

Finished painting

Finished painting

Engrossed!

Our thanks to Stoney for delivering a fascinating, thought-provoking demonstration that was also a great deal of fun.

As well as giving painting demonstrations to groups like ours, Stoney also holds classes titled “Towards Abstraction”, which are aimed at those who want to bring a more contemporary feel to their art. The next one is on 22 January, 2024, at her studio in Wiltshire, which you can book via her website. 

Thanks also go to everyone who attended and to Lynn Pick, one of our members, who was our photographer for the night.