Six Foot Gallery is delighted to present its annual Summer Show, featuring thirty-four artists working in a diverse range of mediums and disciplines.

Maria Bygrove creates intricate representational drawings. Her practice is a form of slow art, where time is a tool as much as the pen or pencil. She works in traditional and
digital techniques, with ink being her medium of choice. Maria strives for elegance and a balance of line and form. Her work is inspired by her life philosophy, and a search for subtlety and inevident beauty.

Hi Maria! Can you walk us through your creative process?
Even though my pieces are mainly rendered with traditional techniques, such as graphite or ink, I usually start digitally. My drawings are often complex and require a good amount of time to be finished so I like to do some prep work beforehand to make sure that I’m happy with the direction I’ll be taking. This might mean working out compositions in Procreate or processing reference images in Photoshop. I will typically do some smaller studies too, before tackling the final piece – I might want to figure out some textures, check how the particular medium works with the paper I’ll be using, etc. All of those steps require active concentration and I like to work through them in peace and quiet, with as little distraction as possible. But when it comes to the final rendering, that part is more like the proverbial ‘flow’. The big decisions have been made and now it’s time to start shading, layer by layer, and watch the image come alive. I like to listen to audiobooks or podcasts as I render. In a way, I think, this helps me to not stress too much when putting pen to paper.

Which artists inspire you? Are there non-artistic influences such as literature
or music that impact your work?
In terms of visual arts, one of my absolute superheroes is Jono Dry, a South African artist who creates large-format hyperrealistic surrealist drawings with graphite. His draftsmanship is awe-inspiring, and I’m also encouraged by his thriving career as a young, self-taught artist working mostly independently of the established art market.

Another artist whose work is hugely influential to me is Luke Adam Hawker. His art too is deeply rooted in strong draftsmanship but what I admire most in his work is the perfect balance of the idea and the detail, the choice of what to render and what to hint at. In personal terms, taking Hawker’s class really improved my confidence when it comes to working in ink.

Apart from other artists, my reading is probably what informs my art most. This applies both to fiction and non-fiction. Books have this incredible power to transport us into other worlds, to let us walk in different shoes, and this always rubs off on me strongly. For example, I begin to see characters from books in the portraits I’m drawing. Or, in the case of the drawing of the Moon which is in this exhibition, I started working on it after I read (and reread 😉 Artemis by Andy Weir. The novel is set on the Moon and Weir manages to make it such a real, tangible place. I began to look at the moon differently, not as a light spot in the sky, not as this mythical, symbolic entity, but as a very real rock, with very specific geographical features, etc. And then I spent some hundred hours getting close and intimate with it.

What emotions or reactions do you hope viewers experience when they see
your artwork?
I hope my work inspires people to pause. My drawings take a lot of time and patience and I hope that some of that time translates into how they are perceived. I hope they can provoke enough curiosity in the viewer to merit an engagement longer than a bare glance, an impulse to lean closer and examine the details. In my experience, drawing is, to a large degree, looking – patient, attentive looking. And in this sense, my creative practice has been transformative for me in terms of how I engage with things that interest me. I hope to be able to pass some of that, through my artwork, on to the viewers.

Will your next project be a continuation of your current style or are you
experimenting with something different? Can you share a glimpse of your
next project?
I have recently completed a large series of portraits in ink where I rendered the shading in scribbly lines. I really liked working through this series, it pushed me to embrace the finality of ink as a medium and to trust the process – to trust that, eventually, I will find the likeness through the looseness of scribbled lines. I definitely want to continue working in this style and I have in mind a series of botanical drawings – portraits of trees from the Isle of Bute, where I live. Another thing I’m really excited about now is watercolours. This is something I have tried before and have always struggled with. Now, I’m finally taking the time to really get to grips with the medium. I love the look of watercolour combined with ink and the possibilities that this combination opens up. I can’t wait to start including it in my practice.

Are there any upcoming events or additional information you would like the
audience to know?
I’ll be showing a piece in the upcoming exhibition at the Dunoon MOCA: Artists’ Altered and Handmade Books. It was my first foray outside of strictly 2D work and I had a lot of fun creating a self-portrait in a book. For anyone interested, the exhibition will run from August 17th until September 14th.

You can find out more about Maria and her work on her website. Our Summer Open Call Exhibition runs at Six Foot Gallery until Friday 23rd August.