Elaine Gould
Elaine lives in Suffolk and London. She has had a 40-year career in music publishing. She trained as a calligrapher before becoming a freelance music copyist and then an editor of contemporary classical mucic for one of the UK's leading music publishers for 36 years. She is a leading authority on music notation, on which subject she has written a text book, and she lectures to student composers in the UK and further afield. She is active as a singer and cellist, being a member of two chamber choirs in London and a string quartet.
After a professional lifetime of working with living composers, she was determined to do something really creative for herself. A compulsive drawer from an early age, she loves nothing more than to absorb herself in wild landscapes by this means. A winter in Ullapool on this wonderful course gave her just this chance!
behindbarsnotation.co.uk
Personal statement - Living landscapes and nocturnes
I'm never happier than when immersed in the wildest of Scottish landscapes. How to communicate their intoxicating power, their very permanence? At the same time the ever-changing weather sheds so many different subtleties of light on them. Moving to Ullapool in the autumn, I became fascinated with the winter dusk lights, with their wild lilacs and rich luminous blues, and the extraordinary gold and orange colours thrown on the white-washed buildings and wet streets by Ullapool's street lamps. Pastel proved a fitting medium for these richly-coloured nocturnal landscapes.
Black and white monotype gave me the flexibility to express the changing elements, and, in contrast, the solidity of both the built environment and mountains profiles. I followed Degas's technique of taking ghost prints (a second printing) from each inked plate and working over with pastel. Card-cut printing enabled me to transfer my sketches to another very immediate medium.
My pieces are a celebration of landscapes enhanced by the juxtaposition of the man-made. The collision of lines between the two fascinates me. The buildings take on monumental form, whilst the constant changes of light gives the landscapes and the mountains a life of their own.
