Within The Creek

Tamsin Johns

Interview by L. Valena
January 28, 2025

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

It was two pieces of photography, kind of a diptych. I think one of them was inverted from the other. It was of a man in what looked like an outbuilding with windows behind him. It was quite eerie; that's the reference that I got. And there were two: the normal photograph, and then the colors were essentially inverted, so the other was the opposite. At first, I wasn't really sure what to do. I didn't know what I was expecting as a prompt but it quite surprised me.

What were your first thoughts and feelings when you opened that up?

I was really drawn to the window at the back. I liked the shape of it, the way it framed the picture, the way it was three panes. It just interested me, and I knew I wanted to do something along the lines of a triptych or framing element with those windows. That's where my mind immediately went.

Cool, what happened next?

I knew I was going to do a painting because that's my medium. I was looking at references of my own photographs and I wanted to find something that had the same slightly creepy undertone that felt slightly unsettling. I didn’t really want to use the man in the prompt. I do a lot of figure drawings, but I felt like he was a separate thing.

So I was looking through my photos and I found one of a quarry that I'd been to on holiday. I remember looking at the photo and thinking something just didn't feel right. It was a bit unsettling, so I thought that would be perfect to paint. It had that same sort of quality that I got from the original picture.

My normal process with landscape painting is “just go for it.” I'm quite impatient. I did an underpainting first, which is what I've been doing recently with my artwork. I like doing an opposite color, like a bold orange or red underpainting.

Then I masked off the page to make sure that, when it was three separate pieces, they would join together to make a landscape that made sense. I taped them off so I could literally work over all three of them at the same time, and then when I took the masking tape off it would be three separate sections. I did cut out the panels and put them on a clean sheet to make them feel more separate and have them exactly the distance part that I wanted. But I worked on them all at once on one sheet so I could get an idea for the scale of the landscape. I had to make sure it was the right size all together. I’d never really worked like that before. I've done triptychs before, but I always seem to make it difficult for myself and do one at a time, whereas with this piece it all flows because it was all done at the same time.

I work quite Impressionist. I get the feeling of the landscape or reference photo, and then go with it and try to capture the feeling more than the realism of the picture.

Talk to me about this arched shape at the bottom.

When I was looking at the original photo of the windows, they went in a square around him, but because his body and the chair were in the way, they cut off half of the window. I quite liked that. It reminded me of triptych paintings in the 18th/19th Century, where they had those Art Nouveau type of star windows. It sort of felt more like that. So I thought it would be nice to cut off sections so you can see the landscape, but you can't see sections underneath where the viewer is. They could be standing on something or they could be watching out, but there's a section that you can’t see that finishes the piece off.

Really cool. And it’s all white behind him, so it’s almost like you’re filling in the gap of what’s there. I love that.

Thank you. Yeah, I quite like that. The rest of the picture was so eerie and there was a lot going on, so that blank space felt like it needed something.

Have you worked with shaped supports/canvases or paper before?

Not for quite a long time, but I seem to go through phases. When I make a collection of artworks, they all have something in common to theme them, but sometimes I've made them because I know how I want them positioned, and exactly the form. I've done triptychs and diptychs before. When I have an idea for a collection, I know how I want them to be displayed together and how they flow, so I tend to do that somewhere in my work. There's always a visual theme that runs through them.

Very cool. And you're working with oil, acrylic, ink? Tell me more about your process.

I work mostly with gouache and acrylic. I'm quite an impatient person, so I've done oils before but I just can't wait for it to dry. I tend to work quite quickly and on wooden boards because it's so smooth, you can just layer. I use thick acrylic, so it's like oil but without the drying time. If I'm not doing that, I do pen. They're really my main things: painting and pen. Sometimes I'll mix them, like in that piece I made, sometimes I do a painting and then go over it with pen to bring in the details a little bit. Different texture.

You said that your reference photo was something that you took when you were at a quarry on holiday. Can you tell me more about this place?

Yeah, it's a place I've been with my partner quite a lot. It's like a campsite with these lovely built houses and it's really random that they have a quarry there for some reason. The land happens to have one. You can go on a little boat and just wander around this abandoned quarry, which I thought was cool. I've also been playing a horror video game called The Quarry. This place was making me think of that. So it’s cool, but it's also a bit creepy because it's so dark and people don't really go there. It was a different experience; I’d never been to a quarry or anything like that before. When I took photos, I thought it felt very otherworldly different for me, so I’d definitely want to put that in a painting at some point.

What else can you tell me about what it’s like there? Is there a vastness? An echoing quality?

Very much so. When you go into the quarry it’s quite sweet. They have little kayaks, a little wooded area, and then when you get into the water, you don't really know how deep it is. You just know it's definitely really deep and it’s all rocks nearly everywhere around and trees covering over. It all feels quite fragile. Where I live in Devon, it's all nature and fields and sheep, things like that. But you don't find those eerie places like quarries. We don't really have those here. So it definitely felt like it'd been taken from somewhere else.

Ooh, that's awesome. Living in Devon, is that how you got into landscape painting?

I’m sort of mixed media, so I tend to do whatever I feel in the moment. Landscape painting has been very recent because of living here. It's just so beautiful. We’re just surrounded by nature, so it's easy to go out and paint landscapes. And I grew up here, so Devon has been quite important for me.

It started when I was doing my degree. I used to be very much portrait-based, and I wanted to try and experiment with landscapes. It loosened up my work a lot. It's very realism-based, more traditional. And I still am, but I found my joy in Impressionist painting. That sort of brought my landscapes out.

I still paint a lot of landscapes, but I do a lot of sketchbook work too. That's what I do day-to-day. I used to be very strict with what I would paint or draw, but now it's getting different inspiration from different things. If I see something I think is beautiful, I might create a piece based off of it, which is quite fun. I think that freed me up, not just sticking to one genre. I'm doing a lot of landscapes at the moment and I've got an exhibition with landscapes, but being able to experiment with different things and not be afraid to change it up is quite nice.

I feel like that’s the opposite of what happens when you go to art school. It doesn't always mean that you are more open; sometimes it means that you get more narrowed in. So that's great!

When I did my degree, I had some issues with one of my lecturers because they didn't particularly like my style of work. I opened up to being more expressive, which I really liked, and they still weren't keen on it. But if you feel like you're going in the right direction, just keep going with it and see what happens.

Oh yeah. I got push back from my style of work as well when I was in school. That’s hard stuff to work through, isn’t it?

Something that I quite like about the magazine is it's all different. People's work is so different, but there's always a connection between each piece. You can look at different styles as well. You're not limited to just one thing, which is really nice.

Is there anything else about your practice that we haven't talked about yet? What are you into these days?

At the moment, I'm really into underpainting and I've got a collection right now that focuses on that. I like working with different color palettes because it shows a lot of the meaning I want to give it. I've been enjoying using bright reds and oranges, just to prep the canvas or the wood board. It doesn't feel so daunting for a start when it’s covered in color. It's not as scary.

Allowing areas to peak through, focusing on where you want to put texture and where you want to leave bits blank, makes it so much easier to find the painting, I think. And I love the idea of using, on a very green-based landscape, bright red underneath. It brings such a pop of color. I've been finding that really fun at the moment. It sort of refreshes when you paint landscapes or even portraits. It brings a little bit more fun to it. You can have fun with the shapes and focus more on the texture.

I think it makes any sort of bleak landscape a bit more fun. There are only so many tones you can put in there, but if you put a random pop of orange in there, it just makes it a bit deeper.

More dynamic for sure. Well, do you have any advice for another artist approaching this project for the first time?

Definitely be open because you won't get something that you expect, if that makes sense. The prompt will definitely throw you off for a minute, but that's quite nice. Then you really have to think about what you want to create in your own style or interest, as well as what's important to you in the reference. When I first saw the photographs, I thought, “I don't know what I’m going to do. I've got no idea.” But then you take a minute and really look at it, and you think, “What elements do I like? What works?” And you can then pull that into your own practice.

Is there anything else that you want to say on the record?

I think the magazine generally and the social media aspect [of Bait/Switch] are really clever. It's really hard as an artist to have a presence and find yourself in different forms. I really like the idea that it's not just a collection of unrelated work. It feels much more collaborative, which I quite like. It's quite hard, especially where I live, as there's a really rubbish art scene. There's not really much going on, so it's quite nice to have the ability to get things from different places and have a little bit more of a collaboration.

Call Number: R98VA | R99VA.joWi

Tamsin Johns is a Devon based artist, primarily working on capturing the beauty of the county and its residents through her impressionist paint style, often working i'en plein air' to some capacity before developing the work further in the studio. Her painting journey has seen her exhibit both in solo and group shows, freelance for customers and even graduate with a BA from Exeter School of Art/Plymouth University. Tamsin often creates work in plein air, through sketching or quick underpaintings which she then takes back to the studio to develop further.