Interview in South East Open Studios September newsletter Karen Birt was interviewed by Franny Swann for the September issue of South East Open Studios newsletter.  The website for South East open Studios is at  http://www.seos-art.org/ Franny Swann interviewed Karen Birt, portrait and landscape artist. Karen, I visited you at Dibgate Farm studios this year. How long have you been doing SEOS? I started two years ago at home in Sevenoaks but it was definitely harder on my own. The family had to keep the house tidy and the weekends were hard. Added to this SEOS is exam time and with school age children I found it hard to commit to dates. Being with the Dibgate artists has been great fun and we can all share the invigilating commitment. There were eight artists this year and it is so nice to do something with other artists. Through connections I made at SEOS this year I got invited to show at two exhibitions.   Your art practice has two parts to it- portraiture and landscape. How would you describe your portraiture practice? My portraits are always executed in oils. I aim to get the form and tone as exact as possible to get a strong sense of presence. There is a point at which the paint turns into a person, a magical moment when the person is looking back at you. Sometimes it comes too early in the process and you have to lose it and find it again. I actually have two styles of portraiture; one which is almost monochrome and has a strong graphic quality. The other is a more traditional layered full colour process and is terribly labour intensive.   How do you decide which process to use? Often I will do a monochrome portrait as a study before I do a full colour. In the Renaissance a monochrome underpainting always preceded the final work.   Do you only work from life? The sitter will come to my studio and my first response is always to sketch. I draw with conte crayon. I am looking for tone at this point. The strong light as it pours over the face is my white crayon and the black is the shadows - both will interlock to give the whole. The first sitting takes two hours. At the end I will take loads of photographs in the same place and light in the studio but from different angles and poses. When the sitter returns for their second sitting I try to avoid them seeing this harsh underpainting! I never work directly on the painting with the sitter in front of me. The sitter is always changing and can be a distraction, so I fix the pose without the sitter. In the second sitting it is all about colour and the response is often vivid and wild. I am looking for warm and cold shadows and highlights on the face. It�s not a piece in its own right; it�s like writing a series of visual notes to myself. Sometimes I get a third sitting. That�s a luxury. I will use it to refine things, to look again. Sometimes there are things you have found hard to figure out.   And then? The big reveal a couple of weeks later.   Fascinating. Your process seems a long way from just drawing the person in front of you. How long does the process usually take? Five weeks, its insanely labour intensive. It�s one of its problems. So much of the truth comes through in the details of observation and analysis.  Maybe my science degree is to blame for my devotion to detail.   What about your landscapes? They are the opposite of my portraiture. Acrylics not oils, colour, space and distance. The magic with landscape is the way you can conjure up miles and miles of distance in just a few square inches.   Your landscapes are very small and unusual, and they are landscape in a portrait format. I see them as the portrait of a landscape at a particular time. I want to get the most intense hit in the feeling of the biggest scale in the smallest space.     How much time do you spend painting? I work five days a week, but I have managed to complete an MA at London Metropolitan which was part-time. I have two kinds of days- one where I paint and one where I am prevented from painting!   Thank you to Karen for allowing us an interesting insight into her working methods. If you would like to be interviewed for the newsletter please contact news@seos-art.org

Sevenoaks Chronicle 'Names and Faces' : The Sevenoaks Series was covered in the Sevenoaks Chronicle with two prominent photographs on the contents page and a full page feature.

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