Stephanie Gay
Having lived in Maidenhead, Berkshire for over 30 years, Stephanie has recently moved to the North Somerset coast with her husband Andy and miniature poodle Frankie. Although she enjoys experimenting in a variety of media, she has specialised in painting on silk for over 15 years.
She exhibits her work widely through group and solo exhibitions and in her own mini gallery in Wrington, Somerset. She has had work included in the Society of Women Artists annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London.
In 2017 Stephanie was awarded Berkshire and Buckinghamshire Life’s Landscape Painter of the Year.
“For me, painting is about not only capturing the visual appearance of my subject but, more importantly, the feelings it inspired in me”
My paintings are mainly painted on pure Chinese habotai 8 silk with specialist silk paints. I start each work with a drawing on paper and then trace the image onto a piece of white silk stretched onto a wooden frame. I then apply a special paint called gutta, which contains natural latex called gutta-percha, over my traced lines. This creates a resistive barrier through which the coloured ink will not flow. I apply the coloured ink with a brush and use salt dropped into the ink whilst wet to created textured effects.
The finished painting is removed from the wooden frame, ironed to fix the colour in the fabric and stretched onto mountboard ready for framing.
She exhibits her work widely through group and solo exhibitions and in her own mini gallery in Wrington, Somerset. She has had work included in the Society of Women Artists annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London.
In 2017 Stephanie was awarded Berkshire and Buckinghamshire Life’s Landscape Painter of the Year.
“For me, painting is about not only capturing the visual appearance of my subject but, more importantly, the feelings it inspired in me”
My paintings are mainly painted on pure Chinese habotai 8 silk with specialist silk paints. I start each work with a drawing on paper and then trace the image onto a piece of white silk stretched onto a wooden frame. I then apply a special paint called gutta, which contains natural latex called gutta-percha, over my traced lines. This creates a resistive barrier through which the coloured ink will not flow. I apply the coloured ink with a brush and use salt dropped into the ink whilst wet to created textured effects.
The finished painting is removed from the wooden frame, ironed to fix the colour in the fabric and stretched onto mountboard ready for framing.
