Meet the Maker – Hester Berry

Hi Hester, Can you introduce yourself and your creative background?

I’m a painter – mainly landscape paintings. I grew up in Devon, and I studied fine art at Aberystwyth University, and it was just a wonderful place. I loved it. I learnt a lot about art and how to engage with the landscape there. It was very hands-on teaching, they taught us a lot of techniques: practical painting, photography, and printmaking. Going out in the landscape and painting as a group. I then did a Masters of Arts in Wimbledon, which was great. Completely different environment, completely different college. I saw two different sides of the art world. Since then, I’ve done a lot of teaching. I lived and taught in Brighton for a while and in the last 10 years I moved back to Devon and I’m able to engage with the countryside a lot more. Still teaching. Still painting.

Could you tell us about some of your earliest memories of making? Did you grow up in a creative environment?

Nobody in my family was involved in the arts. I mean, my dad was musical, my grandparents were quite good at drawing, but they didn’t have any kind of career in the arts. Although, in the last few years, my mum has started doing my life drawing class, and she’s actually very good, so perhaps it came from her, but she’d never tried it out before. There was always music around, but it wasn’t really a creative household, as such. As a child, I was always sitting at the kitchen table, making things out of paper and sellotape and things out of the bin. Models and stuff. I particularly remember painting a boot at school. I must have been about 6 or something and seeing the light falling on it, seeing the way the perspective worked. I just remember something suddenly clicking in that moment.

Do you work primarily from reference material, such as sketches or photography, or is your work more significantly informed by memory or imagination?

For my whole life, I’ve worked really hard at looking and observing and trying to faithfully represent what’s there in front of me and to be as objective and loyal as possible. I feel like I’ve probably bashed away imagination and memory, and I need source material there. In the past, I relied on sketchbooks to gather source material, and then painted from my sketches and notes and things. I’ve also painted plein air. At the moment, I think the most important thing for me is colour, colour accuracy, light, and tone. So I tend to work primarily from photos these days, although I still always carry a sketchbook. The only way, really, to record color as accurately as I can see it is from photos. I paint from photos using my phone so the photos are tiny. I can’t see any detail, all I’ve got is the color. And then everything else that comes is memory, because all I’ve got in front of me is color and the vaguest of shapes.

The representation of light in your paintings is really spectacular. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about your relationship with light and how you are able to capture that within your paintings?

Cézanne apparently said of Monet, ‘he sees with an innocent eye’, and Monet’s one of my favourite painters. There’s a real detachment from what he’s seeing, the subject. He’s just seeing the light. That’s the way I’ve found best to engage with the landscape. In fact, there’s a lot of… environment and environmental causes in the landscape that can get quite political, so I’ve found the best way to look at it is in that very objective way. It’s a good way to look at the world in general, especially if you have political ideas. You want to be honest about things, look at things objectively and realistically, so you can be honest about what you say about it. That ties in really well with just looking at the light falling on things. You don’t have to make any decisions or kind of curatorial choices in your painting, it’s just there for you already. It democratises the landscape. You can have the most beautiful light falling on just the most mundane or vulgar or not stereotypically beautiful landscape. I’ve seen the most radiant sunsets on a car park, behind a grotty bit of town, where the puddles are lit up in pinks and purples and it just turns into a romantic painting. The subject is secondary. It’s the light that is the beautiful thing in it. Light can fall on anything and make it gorgeous, and you can ignore what you’re looking at and just enjoy the light and colours, I think but there’s also this… light is what you see first when you’re bleary-eyed in the morning, it’s what you’re first aware of when you’re born, it’s just the very first thing, it’s the real primal thing that everyone has access to. It doesn’t need explaining. It’s warmth and it’s life. It’s a primal thing to engage with.

When you’re in the moment, for example, you’re on a dog walk, you see a beautiful sunset, do you know immediately ‘this is going to be a painting’? 

I go out with a sketchbook and my phone so I’ve always got my camera. I’ve also got a little app. A very crude little drawing app on my phone, so that I can go through the process of drawing if I haven’t got my sketchbook, which gives me a feel for if I may want to paint a scene. I’ve always got something for recording. I’m always ready. But I find that you can go and plan to spend a whole day hiking with your sketchbook and your watercolours and camera, and just nothing piques your interest. I try to just be open to views all the time, take loads of photos, then narrow things down so that every time I want to go and paint, I’ll look at what I’ve collected and see what I feel like most that day. That’s another reason for not going to sleep on a painting, not letting it go into the next day, because I don’t like to commit to a choice too far before I actually start the work, in case I change my mind. I rarely go out with an idea of what I’m going to sketch and paint, it’s just whatever presents itself and then when I look through my reference materials, it’s instinctive.

See Hester Berry’s ‘Where the light falls’ collection here.