Art at Kerioak

Kerioak works across four disciplines: crochet, sewing, watercolour painting, and photography. All four are made by the same pair of hands in the same studio. This page is a hub for the art side of the work — the painting, the photography, and the thinking behind both. For the fibre and textile work specifically, the gallery and projects pages are the better starting points.

Watercolour and ink

The watercolour work is the smallest part of the studio's output by volume. It runs on a slower rhythm than the crochet — a painting takes concentrated time in a way that a blanket doesn't, and the studio doesn't try to force production beyond what feels right. Pieces tend to come in clusters: a run of botanical studies when the garden is at a particular point in the year, a set of bird studies when the photography has produced good reference material, a flurry of pet portrait commissions in the autumn.

Current subjects in the watercolour range:

• Botanical studies: plant and flower subjects on cold-pressed paper, mostly A3 and A4 format. Foxgloves, teasels, seed heads, the occasional fern study. Available as originals or in a small number of fine art prints.
• Garden bird studies: wrens, goldfinches, sparrows, the occasional robin. Small format, intended as a series. These came out of years of photographing the same garden birds and wanting to understand the subjects more fully by painting them.
• Pet portraits: dogs and cats to commission, occasionally horses. Painted on Arches 300gsm paper. The most-requested category and the busiest in terms of commission work. See dogs in art and cats in art for more on this specifically.

Originals and commissions are handled directly by email. See the prices page for current rates, and the commissions page for the process.

Photography

The photography is mostly wildlife and the local landscape, built up over years of returning to the same places at different hours and in different conditions. The work is slow and repetitive in the way that serious photography tends to be — not tourism, but sustained attention to a particular stretch of river, a particular field, a particular group of garden birds over several years.

The main bodies of photographic work:

• The swan series: an ongoing series photographed along a single stretch of river. Over a hundred frames have been made across many years; a changing selection is in the print catalogue at any one time. The 2017 set still produces the most-requested print, but newer frames are finding their audience.
• Dog portraits: mostly companion dogs photographed outdoors in their own places. The most-asked-about part of the photography side. Several prints from this series are in small editions on Hahnemühle paper.
• Garden birds and wildlife: goldfinches, wrens, foxes, the occasional heron. These tend to be smaller editions and some are only available as private orders depending on how many frames from a particular set ended up being print-worthy.
• Landscape: longer trips for the wider landscape work, less frequent than the local shooting, but producing the larger-format prints.

All prints are archival giclée on Hahnemühle Photo Rag, signed, in editions of 25 or fewer. See the gallery for an overview of what's currently available and the projects page for recent additions to the print catalogue.

How the art fits alongside the making

The four disciplines in the studio are not separate practices that happen to share a room. The photography informs the painting — years of photographing garden birds produced a reference archive that the bird studies drew on directly. The slow rhythm of crochet work sits alongside the slow rhythm of building a photographic series. The sewing uses the same patient, hands-on attention to material that the other three require.

The studio is one person, one set of hands, one set of eyes trained on a consistent set of subjects over a long time. That's the context for all of it. For the longer version, the about page has more. For the writing about the work as it happens, the journal is the place.

To commission work or enquire about purchasing, email [email protected].