Morag Stokes Art Studio

08/09/2026

Artist Sessions in full swing today. Places in this group for artists who have a committed art practice do come up from time to time. DM me if you might be interested in joining us at some future point.

07/09/2026

This is the lower section of my current work in progress in my Biomorphic Forms series. I'm still fiddling around with colour glazes in the top section. It's been a real colour juggle.

03/09/2026

I gave a talk on The Creative Process to the Kapiti Coast Quilters Group last night. It was about what in our lives contribute to the kind of artists and crafters we become - what defines our aesthetic and our creative energy. I mainly talked about the evolution of my own creative process but, given that I was addressing an audience of quilters, I felt compelled to talk a little about Dame Tracey Emin's creative process. She's a multi media British art star who makes, among other things, quilts, blankets and applique works. She has taken what is traditionally an art/craft of women, upended it and placed it squarely in the top echelons of contemporary art. A major retrospective of her work has just ended at the Tate Modern in London. No one in my quilters audience last night knew about her quilts and her creative process. They do now!

30/08/2026

They achieved a lot on one day! Creating palettes, making an abstract design and filling it with colour. Well done all you Working With Colour workshop people.

29/08/2026

Here are some works in progress from yesterday's Working with Colour workshop. The aim of the day was for people to make a wide palette of colours by making mixes from their choice of three colours plus white. They then use a set of guidelines to help them work some of these colours into an abstract painting inspired by Mimi Chen Ting.

29/08/2026

Full house for my colour workshop today. I felt like everyone in this group really 'got' the teaching on colour theory and pigment realities, were able to construct extensive palettes from 3 colours plus white and put them together in an abstract work. I'll post some table shots and finished works over the next couple of days. Here are some group shots of them working their way from palette construction to developed paintings.

26/08/2026

I've been prepping for my Working with Colour workshop on Saturday and I must say that colour mixing continues to throw up surprises for me. If I'm working with an unfamiliar palette of colours, I love to do colour mixing studies to check out the mixing relationships before I start. I hadn't expected to get some nice greens when I reached for a red and a blue!! But here it is - mixing Transparent Red Iron Oxide with Teal gives some cool greens. It's not exactly intuitive but if you know that there's some yellow in the undertone of the Red Iron Oxide, it makes sense. My Saturday workshop will go into pigment realities as well as basic colour theory, all good to know when making paint mixes.
You can see these greens in this unfinished section of the painting I'm currently working on, which still has a way to go in colour development.

25/08/2026

Gavin Archer put the finishing touches on this painting at my Artist Sessions today. This is beautifully composed and coloured and works well in every orientation. He has achieved a lovely textured finish by stippling in layers with the cheapest house paint brushes, trimming them from time to time if they splay too much at the ends. He had a couple of happy accidents with this one - things that he didn't intend happened, but he decided he liked them, so they remained in the work. Serendipity!

21/08/2026

I need a break from my Accumulated Drip Painting and have returned to my Biomorphic Forms series. Here's a detail from my current work in progress. I'm at the colour juggling stage which always goes on for some time. It's more abstracted than my previous paintings in this series - I'm concentrating on line, form and colour with no intention of it making sense in the real world of plants.

18/08/2026

Since I've been involved in a very intense Accumulated Drip Painting for the past couple of months, I've been acutely aware on the impact that certain pieces of music have on my concentration for this laborious and repetitive dripping job. I've honed in on on Armenian Duduk music which seems to help get me into the almost trance like states this kind of painting requires. Last night, however, I came across something else which is hard to describe - the perfect dripping music. Have a listen to this. If you don't have time for all the talky pre-amble, just move on about 7 minutes in and listen to the whole piece - from the Tibetan Bowls to some incredible cello and very simple guitar (like I used to play).

Seeing music as more than just a way to entertain and move our emot...