Pippa Lea Pennington

I love taking pictures of things that stop me in my tracks. Sometimes it's a tree, a tiny flower, the way the light catches the thread of the bird my grandmother embroidered as the early morning sun slices through the pink glass of the jug on the table. 

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I'm constantly enchanted by the way nature , in all it's many permutations , asserts itself in this increasingly hostile world. 

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Beauty and the wonder that beauty inspires in us , is what I want to portray . I want the viewer to feel something of that wonder that struck me when I photographed that particular image. It's also to show the viewer something that perhaps they didn't notice before, and will make them look again, look closer, never stop looking and marveling at these moments that are put in our way. 

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I bring the images into the studio and interpret them in a variety of mediums.  I like working with many different things , from oils and watercolours , pastels, coloured inks and crayons. It depends on what I want the image to say . Light, and what it does to colour , exploring different textures and how best to capture their differences, is at the heart of most of my work. It is realistic, but not slavishly photographic. At some point in the process, I put the initial reference aside, and the work is allowed to dictate how it is finished. 

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There is always detail . I can't resist wanting to draw someone's eye closer in , and detail does that. I also feel bound to honor that plant, flower, cloth , and not to gloss over its intricacies. 

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The work is extremely time consuming, but it's a compulsion I'm happy to indulge. After many years squeezing my studio into bits of leftover space , and carving out bits of time 

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to work , with never enough of either, I now have a big, light filled studio which makes my happy every time I walk into it. 

I hope to be there and working all day for many more days to come.