Colours of Intuition
DRIFT Art Review is a new and long-awaited publication dedicated entirely to art in Cornwall and is billed as The Collectors’ Companion for Cornish Art 2022. In this very first edition, Dan Warden interviews me about the creative process as I experience it and my (rather unconventional) path to becoming an artist, via corporate America and art consulting.
“The landscape and the environment I’m in plays a large role in my work,” says Trudy. “It’s as if the energetic information of place and Self is translated and encoded into each painting.”
Colours of INTUITION by Dan Warden
An Immersive Journey of Creativity, from Consultancy to the Canvas
Born in Bristol, Trudy Montgomery now lives and paints in west Penwith. Interestingly, she had actually given up on art by the age of 13, but having grown up with paintings lying all over the house, “often drying on the Aga”, a love for the medium had nevertheless instilled itself from a young age. “I remember comparing myself to my artist mother, Kathy Montgomery, and deciding that I would never be as good as she was. I now know that drawing takes practice!”
After studying Economics and Politics at Exeter University, Trudy worked in London, until 1998 when she moved to California, working for dotcom companies in Silicon Valley and San Francisco. “While working in corporate America, I studied art at night school with teachers from UC Berkeley, San Francisco Art Institute, and later at Otis School of Art and Design in Los Angeles,” says Trudy. “More recently, I’ve attended year-long courses at the excellent Newlyn School of Art in Cornwall.” Reflecting on a text that inspired her transition into painting, Trudy says: “It was a book called Sacred Contracts and Your Archetypes, by Carolyn Myss. I read the section on the artist, which said that if you dedicate part of your energy to supporting artists - as I was at the time as a curator and art consultant - then you’re the ‘Artist Archetype’. A lightbulb went off and I thought, oh my goodness, I could pick up a paintbrush and start, even though I was aged 35.”
Trudy started painting in 2005, whilst living in California. “I was running an art consultancy firm, helping collectors source contemporary art from galleries and artists’ studios all over the world. As I walked the halls of the art fair Art Basel Miami Beach one year, I realised that I was looking for a particular painting that I just couldn’t find – one that I would have to paint myself.
“I immediately asked my mother to teach me how to mix a palette,” says Trudy, “and I took a lot of classes with her teacher, Robin Child, an inspiring man whose own teacher was taught by Walter Sickert. I made a lot of mistakes and a lot of bad paintings, but it was more fun and more challenging than anything else I had ever done. “Once I started, I found that I just really liked putting paint on canvas. The buttery texture; how you can tell if a brushstroke is tentative or confident; learning how colours work together; discovering the effects of scraping away and drawing into paint. It was all fascinating.”
Trudy mixes her palette intuitively and paints from a meditative state of action, using the possibilities of paint to convey in the abstract what is, so often, inaccessible via words. The frequency of colour and the energy of gesture, which are infused with her emotional state of being on any given day; all impact her work. Her paintings range from expressive landscapes to pure abstraction. “The landscape and the environment I’m in plays a large role in my work,” says Trudy. “It’s as if the energetic information of place and self is translated and encoded into each painting. I draw upon my inner vision and there’s a dialogue that emerges with the canvas.
“There are times when I’m painting, that I feel all the hairs on my body stand on end, and I know that there’s something else at work. ”
“I’m interested in expressing the inner landscape – the essence of being in time and space. By that, I mean the essential nature of our true selves, which lies beneath all the identities we adopt to navigate the world. There are times when I’m painting,” says Trudy, “that I feel all the hairs on my body stand on end, and I know that there’s something else at work. Writers often say ‘the book wrote itself’ and I believe there’s a creative energy that flows through the hand of all artists. “In a way, I am collaborating with colour and it’s this metaphysical aspect that keeps me really engaged. For me, painting is a spiritual practice.”
I ask Trudy to walk me through her process. “When I come into the studio, the first half an hour is the most important because I come in with fresh eyes and look at the paintings I worked on the day before. I make a cup of tea and sit in front of the work to really look and identify how I feel about them. I pay special attention to the colour and composition, noting what’s working and what’s not; trying to identify why it’s bothering me. Usually, I can see things I didn’t the day before. This intuitive feedback sets the direction for the day’s painting and gives me inspiration and the impetus to get to work with mixing a palette to continue where I left off.”
Trudy can be found working on several paintings at a time, building up layers of paint that may later be scratched into, edited, or even obliterated entirely, in what she calls a “process of discovery in which I seek to find rather than make a painting”. This means that initial sketches have to be abandoned quite early on as each composition evolves. “Every decision I make changes the whole image, and must then be responded to,” says Trudy.
“It makes the creative process exciting, though sometimes frustrating, but certainly never boring.” Reflecting on all of this, Trudy identifies a stage of turmoil, or chaos, that usually takes place in the middle of the creative process, which she says can be very frustrating. “I can feel like I’ve hit a wall. You have to do something radical to break through it – be bold and fearless, stop caring and even be prepared to mess it up. If you don’t, the creative process seems to shut down prematurely and you make a ‘nice’ painting, but not an exciting one. That’s playing it safe. Once, I threw a bucket of paint at a painting in despair of what to do next. It was so exciting to see what happened, as it reinvigorated the direction and I had something new to respond to,” says Trudy. “I still love that painting.”
“Once, I threw a bucket of paint at a painting in despair of what to do next. It was so exciting to see what happened next!”
“If and when it does come together, it can do so quickly and unexpectedly. I know when a painting’s finished when it stops bothering me; it feels satisfying somehow, and complete.”
I’m interested to learn about her choice of materials, colour and scale; to understand how they express the subjects that inspire her. I learn that she mainly works in oil and acrylic on canvas or wood panels. She has, more recently, started working on paper too, since an artist residency that she completed last year in Greece. “I select and mix my palette intuitively, and put a lot of attention on the vibrancy of colour relationships that sing off each other. It’s through colour and gesture that the energy of place is also somehow conveyed into the paintings,” says Trudy “whether it’s the feeling of being Cornwall or on a Greek island.”
Her time in California opened Trudy’s eyes to a sense of space, which, she explains, translated into making very large-scale canvases. “At this time my palette became very vibrant and bold against the intense sunlight there. Even when I returned to the UK in 2012, it never became muddied or grey, and I retained that sense of using pure, clear colour to express the inner world on canvas.”
“As an art consultant, I looked at a lot of art galleries and walked the big art fairs for clients. I love the scale and assertiveness of large abstract paintings – especially by American abstract artists such as Richard Diebenkorn, Ed Moses, Franz Klein and Robert Motherwell. I am also very attracted to the pure fluid colour of Emily Mason’s work and Helen Frankenthaler. Standing on front of Rothko’s huge colourfield paintings is one of my earliest inspirations.
“Working at scale also allows me to reach out the arm and give the gesture full expression and freedom of spirit, which isn’t possible on a small painting. Georgia O’Keefe said ‘I found I could say things with colour and shapes that I couldn’t say in any other way – things I had no words for’. This resonates deeply with me. The energetic frequency of each colour is a communication and we feel that, even if only subconsciously.”
Trudy paints in silence, without music or distractions. It’s very much a meditative practice, she explains: “I go in quite deep, and there begins a dialogue with the painting on a subliminal level. It’s also an active process and can be quite tiring, especially as I am usually standing all day, but it’s also deeply nourishing and I often lose track of time. A full day’s painting can feel like only five minutes have passed.”
“It’s through colour and gesture that the energy of place is also somehow conveyed into the paintings”
Working from a studio built inside an old barn, Trudy has found the perfect space to complement her process. “It’s large and spacious with large skylights, a paint- splattered floor and a riot of colour on the walls. It’s my haven; the place in which I create and collaborate with the colours that become my paintings. When everything feels too much, I only have to go in there to find my centre again. “People often say my paintings are uplifting and joyful,” says Trudy, reflecting on how her work is received. “I wonder if it’s because they feel the energy of colour and perhaps even for some pieces an ethereal quality? I’d like to think that people are left a little bit transformed by engaging with the work – just as I am.”
Appraisals within the sphere of Cornish art have hailed Trudy as one of the ‘next generation of artists in Cornwall, whose work is part of a direct line of British expressionist painting which has its roots in the ground- breaking abstraction of artists such as Patrick Heron and Peter Lanyon.’ The same writer highlights Trudy’s ‘tendency towards pure, bold colour on an immersive scale’, recognising the influences of ‘light and space of both the Californian and Cornish coast’, as well as Trudy’s own spiritual landscape.
Looking to the future, Trudy is currently working on a series of paintings grounded by meditations, which, she explains, are “charged with the sounds and intention of each day’s meditation”. Each piece feels potent, but Trudy is reluctant to share more at this stage. That said, she does hope to display them as a group in a grid format, “so that when you stand in front of them, you can tune into each frequency as well as feel the power of the whole.”
“They are more strongly directed than anything else I have done, and the process is intense and quite tiring. It’s led me to wonder how Hilma Af Klint felt as she created her paintings as there is a definite feeling of collaborating with spirit.”
Read the full publication here on pages 120-127: https://issuu.com/engine-house-media/docs/drift_art_book_binder_for_issuu
