Ahead of her short course 'Mixed media landscape painting on clay board', as part of Clay Week, we sat down virtually to chat about her unique gesso recipe and her artistic journey.

Could you just introduce yourself and what you do?

I'm Laura Dennis, I'm a professional painter and printmaker and I'm based in South Wales in the Brecon Beacons National Park. My practise is really centred around landscape painting, and I work on a specially formulated clay board. This clay board recipe is one that I developed over a long time whilst looking for a surface that behaves like a water colour paper. That recipe has been my main focus for the last few years and now I’m about to make a new series of work. I have a little studio and gallery in Brecon as well as a studio in the mountains, right up in the hills which is very inspirational. That’s me in a nutshell, I think!

You say you were searching for this recipe for a clay gesso, what inspired this pursuit?

I'm a watercolourist and oil painter and I really like how watercolour bleeds onto paper, but you can't put oil paints onto it. I like the depth of oil, that very luminous deep colour. So, it really came about looking for this surface that I could do both on. I was watching a programme about the old frescoes which used blind plasters and clay and despite clay board being used by lots of different artists, clay in and of itself sucks the water out too quickly and stops any of the bleeds happening. So, I started this quest to find what could you counter the clay with, what ingredients would allow it to absorb pigment, but not so much that it prevents the bleed. Part of that process was trying to keep everything archival, mutual and environmentally friendly. It became about adding different minerals and substrates to the clay to make this surface. It became a sort of mad science experiment; I was ringing random companies and lime plasterers until I was eventually able to create this nice surface during lockdown and finally get a recipe together. This is what I'll be teaching at West Dean, and it means that anyone who's doing the course will have this recipe, and they can go on to use and adapt it. It's so versatile, it's not only the wet media you can use, you can use oil pastels too, you can apply it to lots of different surfaces as well. They make really effective and interesting ways to work,its different to canvas and traditional gesso. The light effects you can get from it is really interesting and almost Turneresque. The pigments bleed, you can accurately layer up colour - it's very exciting and something quite unusual!

Can you talk a little bit about your journey and how you became a professional artist?

I guess all artists have an odd and varied path to their artistry, but I studied art and design at Leeds University, graduated and came back to Wales and panicked! I was thinking, ‘Oh God, there's no viability in the arts. It will never work’. So, I ended up doing another degree in criminology and sociology and went into the civil service as a statistician. I spent a few years in London doing these very office-based jobs. I was still making art and came back to it again and again, but I remember just going to work one day and thinking I cannot sit at a computer desk for the rest of my life. Then after an opportunity to spend six months not paying everything sort of aligned to allow me to take the jump. Working from home I slowly increased my teaching and slowly built up my practise, doing exhibitions here and there. Then I moved up to Scotland and that's really where it took off. I was living in a very remote location, and it was this now or never, do or die moment. It had to work. In that time my practise really developed, and I had all these ideas for creating with clay. In lockdown I moved back home to South Wales and rented a little shop. I worked out the back in the studio and then had a gallery in the front. This year I've moved my studio out of that shop space and into a private space in the hills and now use the shop to teach workshops from. That’s the journey so far, it's not been easy to be an independent artist, it's a struggle trying to find a balance between trying to make money and trying to focus on your practise. But I've survived!

What would you advise other people who are at the beginning of their journey who aspire to be an artist professionally? Those who experience that same itch to create in the way you described.

I would say if that is within you and you are always returning to it, focus on that. Make things work. Do a bar job, do something that can clear your head that allows you to still make. There are always things that you can fall back on and there are always things that you can make work. Don't suppress your creativity. Just keep going and network with artists around you, go and see exhibitions, make the time to make. Sometimes, you’re knackered when you get home from work, you feel like crap, but just doing half an hour a day your practice will build slowly and slowly. We’ve all experienced that nerve racking thought of ‘Oh my God. What am I doing?’. Especially as we’re often staring at blank space and having to make something out of nothing in a totally self-directed way. For that reason, discipline is really vital. I do think that if that creativity is in you, don't ignore it.

More broadly why is it important for people to get involved in creative endeavours and engage with art?

Because it's the core of our being. We're in this very strange world where everything has to have a means to an end. It's go, go, go. What creating does, whether writing, making art, journaling, anything, is slowing our brains down and it's actually reconnecting us with something in our core. Humans are only differentiated from animals because we are creative. I’ve found that the act of making art in a class creates a sense of being open, I find that people who come to my classes end up opening up about their lives, talking about things that maybe they haven’t otherwise had space to talk about. It's doing something that is freeing. There is also something special about learning a new skill, we can go years without really doing anything new and I think there’s something really important about creating something for the sake of it. Having four hours space to just make, most of the time it doesn't even matter how it turns out. It's just the act of doing, it's calming. You see people that come in tense by the end of a class they're relaxed. It's meditative, isn't it?

I think you’re right, as adults we're really bad at learning new skills, it requires us to be vulnerable, to be willing to be bad at something, to ‘fail’.

Absolutely, I think we should get rid of that fear. It can be quite anxiety inducing for some people, some people get quite nervous about going into classes. But I think once they are through the door, it's such a wonderful experience. But you’re right we go through all this education and get to 16 or 21 and stop and then fall into that pattern of day to day life. But learning is just nice to do, isn't it? And making art is a bit like baking. It doesn't really matter how it turns out, it’s the process which is enjoyable.

Laura will be teaching and give a talking as part of Clay Week and you can book her mixed media landscape painting short course here.