ldakers
I’m Louise, an artist living in London with my daughter and boyfriend. In October 2022 I had my first exhibition at The Other Art Fair where I was chosen as one of two ‘New Futures’ winners and even though I’ve always been painting and drawing, since then I’ve been doing a lot more of it, and I’m currently preparing for my fourth TOAF in a few weeks’ time.
I’m not quite sure how to describe my style as I feel it’s changing a bit and I’m trying new things, but at the moment I paint characters in various scenes on canvas and paper, often women and often related to what goes on emotionally for me at the time.
I start with an initial sketch and try out different colour ways on my iPad before I draw it on the canvas and start painting. I work as a graphic designer which definitely influences my art in terms of composition and line work; there is a lot of measuring and I use a LOT of frog tape to get lines straight and clean.
My colour palette a year ago was quite limited as I would only use pink, purple, turquoise and yellow but I’ve enjoyed branching out and trying out different combinations lately and I often mix different colours together get the exact shade I want. The brands I use the most are Liquitex and Lefranc Bourgeois as they’re a joy to paint with and I love the quality.
To get my backgrounds flat and avoid brush streaks I used to use a roller to cover my canvas but it wasted a lot of paint and was tricky to get even so now I use Flow Improver and a big brush and get pretty much the same results.
To get the rest of the painting to have a similarly flat look I used mainly acrylic gouache to get minimal amounts of brush strokes. Recently though I’ve been playing with textures and have wanted visible brush strokes so I’ve started using a lot of heavy body paint for this.
For finer details I use tiny brushes for acrylic nail art and sometimes the smallest sized Posca pens. The subject matter is the same, I still paint my lonely woman, although I’ve added friends and family in some pictures, so she’s not always on her own anymore.
She is still curvy though, and will stay that way as I find todays beauty standards toxic and she’s not conforming to them. Another thing that hasn’t changed much is the emotional roller coaster of creating which normally goes from me absolutely hating what I’m making to turning a corner somewhere in the middle when I can see it starting to come together and then eventually being happy with it. But I guess this is standard for a lot of artists though?
Instagram: @louiselillynordh
Website: www.louisenordh.com/art
Saatchiart: www.saatchiart.com/louisenordh
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