As the pandemic brought international travel to a halt, Claudia Hartley thought it would be a good time to look back on her previous trips. “I decided that I would take my past sketchbooks and do a series of paintings from old sketches,” she says. The results will be showcased at the exhibition Paintings from My Travel Journals at Bonner David Galleries in Scottsdale, Arizona.
Painting from black-and-white sketches allowed Hartley to stretch her imagination. “I don’t get influenced by any colors,” she says. “I’ve painted a lot from life and photographs, but with a black-and-white sketch, I can use the colors that come to me in my mind.” Hartley had to switch from using oil paints to acrylics for health reasons. At first, she found the acrylic frustrating to work with, but after experimenting, she found her own style. “At first, the flatness of the paints bothered me. If you don’t have the right skill, acrylics start to look like a coloring book,” she says. But by mixing the paints to tone down the color, she turns the inherent brashness of acrylics into something bright and joyful.
“It’s a fine line between too bright and too dull.”
She starts by covering the canvas in a yellow ochre paint in order to convey warmth. “If white canvas shows through, it just sticks out like a sore thumb,” she says. Then, she uses crimson paint to create the outline of the scene.
The painting View of Italian Lake From My Balcony comes from a sketch she made during her first trip out of the United States several decades ago. “I was 37 years old and I had never traveled in my life, but I met a couple from Switzerland and I went to Europe to visit them,” she says. “That Italian lake means a lot to me.”
A few paintings in the show document a trip to Ireland she took with a cousin. “We went for three weeks and drove around the whole island, which I would not recommend to any American. It was the most dangerous thing,” she remembers. Ireland Green depicts the Dingle Peninsula, featuring the country’s trademark craggy ocean cliffs and green grasses.
Hartley says that revisiting her old sketches has been a way to relive some of her fondest memories, and her paintings portray that joy. She explains, “If I’m painting something that doesn’t look quite right, I go back into it and ask myself what I can do to make it look happy, and then I love what I get.”
