Layers 1

Touched by nature

My collaged artwork is all about the layers. I am a mixed-media artist working with a range of media from paint, ink, collage, print and stitch to describe the world I live in and my connection to nature and the landscape. I layer media to capture shape, line, pattern and texture to evoke a story of a moment in time and how I felt in my skin.

Helen Hallows - mono-print with charcoal drawing

I write about what it takes for me to create, to capture ideas and find the confidence to express them, to keep on growing as an artist and to overcome the fear of failure, to overcome the inner-critic and to trust the process. I teach these ideas in my online courses and I nourish others to find their creative voice and express themselves with what they have, right here, right now.

To turn up to make art, to stay in flow, takes courage and curiosity. It takes the nourishing of superpowers in all the senses and the honing of the relationship between what you see, think and do (eyes, brain, hands). It takes intuition to listen to your soul, to be brave to try new things and to weather the failures to reach the successes.

To be creative means staying whole heartedly open with all your senses switched on. I ‘see’ the world through all my sight yes but also touch, smell, taste and sound. Through them I experience the joy and pain of being alive. In my art I try to express the joy, the contemplation, the noticing of details. I get emotional. I see pictures in my head that I store to interpret nature. If the world gives me beauty that moves me, that’s a very good place to start.

Recently I had one of those moments appear before me. I was a passenger in a car, no camera, no sketchbook. Just heart and eyes wide open. Driving through a winter landscape where the mist sat low and layers of grey hilltops peaked above the low cloud. Parts of the landscape lay shrouded, iced tree tops touching the sky above. Layers of grey and lilac in icy stillness. My mind took a picture in that moment and it waits within for me to paint it.

In a hard world it can feel a bit soppy to be moved by nature. But it’s precisely the barriers of this hard world I want my art to break. I want others to feel the moment, to be blessed by seeing beauty and feeling the sanctity of being alive. I want more of the moments that make me cry, that make me reach for the hand of another, that make connections that matter. We are all made of layers, but it is the deep layers that I seek. It is the deep places and spaces that make me make art.

Helen Hallows - paint and collage

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I post three free-to-read posts each month and a subscriber post that I publish on the first of every month. It’s a magazine style post where I share, over a three monthly cycle, inspirations, creative wellbeing advice, how to manage creative block and move to creative flow. In month two, I share lessons from my online courses in the form of a ‘dose’ of creativity to kickstart your sketchbook practice. Coming in 2025 are interviews with other artists as well as news from my studio and insights into my creative practice (in month 3). Join my tribe for £5 a month or £50 a year and get access to my previous posts too.