Our featured Artist Member for January is Janine Partington
Janine Partington explores mark making and colour through the carving and painting of leathers and other materials to create distinctive and appealing surfaces. The simplicity of the process, the hand of the maker being visible, is important to her. Janine is constantly working towards the creation of a distinctive visual language in her chosen medium – experimenting with marks, composition and colour, playing with form and layering.
I’m forever playing through ideas in my head. They come from the everyday, my personal history, nature, from requests and from commissions. Everything is linked and a tiny mark on one piece might spark a whole new composition. I want to produce work that is different and unique and so am constantly trying new textures and colours for my carved leather compositions.
I have two studios – one is outside the home at BV Studios in Bristol and is where I do all my enamelling and paint frames. My second studio is in my home and is where I create all my leather work. It is a narrow space which many years ago was created as a space for my kiln when I enamelled at home. We split our kitchen and added an extension about 20 years ago and I got a slither of the kitchen – my desk is actually the old kitchen worktop. My studio is located in the middle of the house, but I have a narrow internal window that lets in light from the dining area. The space is chock full of old and new projects and materials from lots of different media – there’s printing equipment and lots of different papers from my paper cutting days, felt and fabrics from when I used to make soft toys. It’s where I keep my computer and printer and do all my paperwork but also where I stick down all my panels and pack them for orders and galleries, there is a big pile of flattened cardboard boxes in one corner. There are filing cabinets filled with different offcuts of carved and painted leather panels sorted by colour. Sitting at my long narrow desk I have a magnetic panel in front of me with all my tools including lino cutting tools, lots of scissors, set squares, awls, pliers etc. Everything is close at hand and I’m at my happiest when I’m simply sitting in this chaotic but quiet space carving leather and painting colours into the marks.
In 2019 a few years into working with leather I made a collection of pieces in 2 and 3D about my father and his Alzheimers. This was exhibited at Collect Open in the Saatchi Gallery. My father died shortly before completing the work and I made a final piece about his death and what comes after. It was a passion project and involved looking at memory and loss in many different ways. It challenged me. I have since created a further collection about his life and one about my mother’s. Making work that is personal to me takes a lot of time and a lot of percolation – often years.
I love paintings by Van Gogh and Klimt, ceramics by Rupert Spira, textiles by Matthew Harris to name but a few. I like texture and colour in all its forms. I am inspired by so many makers who are passionate about what they do and manipulate their materials in extraordinary ways, but the person who most inspires me is my father, Enos Lovatt. He was an obsessive and obsessed painter who taught for 30 years – his use of colour was extraordinary and I am always hoping that just a little bit of his magic with imbue my work. Over the years I have realised that it is colour in all its forms that charms and holds me captive and discovering the relationships between colours, the nuances and the surprises is my constant joy.
A collection of Janine Partingtons work is available to purchase online and in the gallery