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marc yeats
Marc Yeats is a composer, researcher and visual artist based in Somerset whose music is performed, commissioned and broadcast worldwide. As one of the UK’s most prolific leading contemporary composers, his works have been performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and stations across Europe, Asia and Australasia. In his visual art, working in acrylic and mixed media, Yeats creates abstract landscapes and seascapes inspired by locations around the south coast of England.
I find composing so much easier than painting. Well, I think I do. That may just be a glib generalisation because I’ve been focused on composition for the past few decades and have developed a particular technique for getting what I want. Most times. Both have their challenges, for sure, but finding what I want to do and how I want to do it with oil paints after all these years feels very demanding. Trial and error. Trial and success. Or something like that.
Although heavily abstracted, in some senses, I find myself drawn to landscape as a fixed point to express light, shadow, sky and land, vegetation, season, topography, weather, vibrancy and all the other landscape features I enjoy. But I’m not trying to mimic nature or create the illusion of reality. I’ve been there and done that in my 20s. Now, I’m trying to recreate the sensation of landscape through bold, energetic, untidy and chaotic brushstrokes, broad colours, mess and roughness. I’m trying to transmit something of my kinetic sense of landscape as something in constant motion and change through my body and into the work. At the moment, it’s a love hate relationship. I think I’ve achieved something (in a particular painting) only to return the day after and question what I’ve done. Some days I ‘see’ what I’m painting, other days I see only chaos and disorder. It’s a fine line and I am not settled as yet on what I’m doing or how I’m doing it. Perseverance is key. Each mark, kept or rubbed away, adds to the whole. The scars of lost actions remain to create the ‘detail’ of a particular layer of activity. Nothing is wasted. I trust I’m moving in the right direction for me. Learning from my mistakes to make them my strengths and build a technique in painting as robust as that in composition. It’s early days still and there’s a lot of playful exploration going on. Hit and miss. Hopefully, more hits as time passes. I remain excited. I’m still finding the concentration exhausting but I move forward in the hope of capturing those sensations on canvas that I so dearly love to experience in the wider world.
Marc Yeats is a composer, researcher and visual artist based in Somerset whose music is performed, commissioned and broadcast worldwide. As one of the UK’s most prolific leading contemporary composers, his works have been performed by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra, Hallé Orchestra, broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and stations across Europe, Asia and Australasia. In his visual art, working in acrylic and mixed media, Yeats creates abstract landscapes and seascapes inspired by locations around the south coast of England.
I find composing so much easier than painting. Well, I think I do. That may just be a glib generalisation because I’ve been focused on composition for the past few decades and have developed a particular technique for getting what I want. Most times. Both have their challenges, for sure, but finding what I want to do and how I want to do it with oil paints after all these years feels very demanding. Trial and error. Trial and success. Or something like that.
Although heavily abstracted, in some senses, I find myself drawn to landscape as a fixed point to express light, shadow, sky and land, vegetation, season, topography, weather, vibrancy and all the other landscape features I enjoy. But I’m not trying to mimic nature or create the illusion of reality. I’ve been there and done that in my 20s. Now, I’m trying to recreate the sensation of landscape through bold, energetic, untidy and chaotic brushstrokes, broad colours, mess and roughness. I’m trying to transmit something of my kinetic sense of landscape as something in constant motion and change through my body and into the work. At the moment, it’s a love hate relationship. I think I’ve achieved something (in a particular painting) only to return the day after and question what I’ve done. Some days I ‘see’ what I’m painting, other days I see only chaos and disorder. It’s a fine line and I am not settled as yet on what I’m doing or how I’m doing it. Perseverance is key. Each mark, kept or rubbed away, adds to the whole. The scars of lost actions remain to create the ‘detail’ of a particular layer of activity. Nothing is wasted. I trust I’m moving in the right direction for me. Learning from my mistakes to make them my strengths and build a technique in painting as robust as that in composition. It’s early days still and there’s a lot of playful exploration going on. Hit and miss. Hopefully, more hits as time passes. I remain excited. I’m still finding the concentration exhausting but I move forward in the hope of capturing those sensations on canvas that I so dearly love to experience in the wider world.