Through the Eyes of... Nina Packer

THROUGH THE EYES OF...

NINA PACKER

With a beautifully rich colour palette and delicate light play, Nina Packer is an artist based in the Roseland Peninsula. Graduating from the London Guildhall in 2001, her passion lies in mark making and colour.

Firstly, tell us about one of your chosen locations to paint and why it inspires you... Cornwall is full to the brim of beautiful places. Under normal circumstances I spend a lot of time painting in Portscatho alongside other artists from The New Gallery. However, during this remarkable past year I spent a lot of time walking and working in my immediate surroundings, so, I have chosen the hedgerows and hollow ways around where I live; on the edge of The Roseland, a stone’s throw from Mevagissey, within sight of China Clay Country and where every village keeps a Saint.

When painting your location, is there anything that really catches your eye that you enjoy focusing on? The lanes here are banked by high Cornish hedges and are teeming with treasures if you have the time to stop and look. They can be busy with traffic, but during lockdown were quiet and I walked some of them for the first time in the decade I’ve lived here. It felt like we reclaimed them for a little while, and I discovered things I didn’t know existed: hidden streams, animal roads, banks of violets, Minotaur Beetles! I especially love the surprise panorama field views that open up when you hit a gateway, ever-changing in appearance with crop cycles and weather.

Describe the sounds, smells and feelings you experience in your location… Mustard yellow striped snail shells lining the road like little jewels – I think they fall from the hedges and get trapped on its dusty surface. The otherworldly, fax crazy song of a skylark fading to nothing as it climbs the clouds. The earthy smell of wet oak leaves in autumn and heady meadow sweet in the heat of summer. The way that the banks of primroses seem to glow on a mizzly day, the textures of robins pincushions and oak apples – all of this feels good.

What colours do you like to use when painting your location? My favourite blue is Windsor Blue-Green Shade; mix in a little Cadmium Yellow with white and you have the perfect turquoise. I could drink Emerald Green neat, it is just a perfect colour, Naples Yellow and Sap Green are palette staples, and I love the soft cream you get from Indian Yellow. I don’t use black at all, instead I use Indigo.

When painting/practicing ‘en plein air’, what do you think about and what are your processes when painting this way? I think the sense of pleasure and focus at being present in the landscape; and trying to channel this feeling into a picture through coloured pigments! Sometimes I paint in the environment directly – I have a portable pochade box that I use for small oil paintings - or I might draw outside with charcoal or watercolour and work back in the studio, sometimes I’ll bring back hedge treasures to use in studio pictures. What challenges do you face when conveying your location onto canvas? The eternal problem of how to capture and convey the spirit and feeling of a place alongside its appearance; some pictures can look like their subject but be quite dead in feeling, trying to get the right balance is something I’m still learning.

Finally, what do you love most about your location? The way it changes day by day and through the year, the foxgloves and their ghostly cousins the Pennywort flowers, the delicate grasses this time of year and the festoon strings of ruby bryony berries in autumn, the bramble tangle of the green lane next to our house, with feather evidence of a fox’s dinner. I love that it’s a living place with stories to tell and that nature goes about its business regardless of whether I’m there to notice it. l

You can discover more of Nina Packer’s work in the charming space of The New Gallery at Portscatho and online at www.thenewgalleryportscatho.co.uk

The New Gallery, Portscatho, Cornwall, TR2 5HW T: 01872 580719 E: chrisinsoll@gmail.com

Opening times: Thursday to Saturday, 10am – 12.30pm, 2 – 5pm The gallery is also open by appointment which you can call or email to arrange.