The opinions expressed in this article are the writer’s own and do not reflect the views of Her Campus.

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at St. Andrews chapter.

This week, St Andrews’s Art Society is organising their semester’s exhibition. This exhibition is entitled This is Art Soc!: Artist Highlights. It is designed to showcase the portfolios, individual art journeys, and styles of various Art Society members. Earlier this semester, I sat down with artist Iain Lynn, one of the featured artists of the Art Society’s exhibition this semester. Iain’s art will be up from Tuesday, the 5th of March to Monday, the 11th of March. I spoke with him about his artistic journey, key artistic influences, and his tips for aspiring artists. I also had the privilege of seeing his studio.

Iain Lynn (he/him/his) is a third year Philosophy student. He works primarily in oils, mostly in portraiture, and due to limited budget, particularly in self-portraiture. His work focuses primarily on the subtle interplay between limited colour palettes, or how to do as much with as little.

Tell us about your journey to becoming an artist and what initially inspired you to pursue art?

I’ve done acting and drama for quite a long time. My dad has always been interested in visual arts. I never did it in school and stopped at Year 9. It was only a year and a half or two years ago that I started doing art. I live in the middle of nowhere — in a little village — which had no shops, and there was a birthday coming up. I didn’t have any cards to give them, so I thought “I’ll look up something I know they’ll like, and I’ll copy that!” So I did that, and I found it quite fun. I kept doing that for people’s cards, and I found it quite fun to draw. I found this old toolbox filled with oil paints that was my dad’s. I thought I’d explore with that, and then I really enjoyed it. So now I keep painting. It’s out of pure enjoyment rather than any sort of deep feelings.

Tell us about your studio. How have you set up your studio for your creative process(es)?

My studio is — terribly — my bedroom. I have recently gotten an easel — it wasn’t actually mine — which was knocking around my house at home, and I’ve brought that up. That was only semi-recently, and before that I had to put stuff on desks. So now I have an easel, and it now looks like a real studio. My studio has to be my room, because I have a flatmate, and I don’t want to annoy him and harm him with all my obnoxious vapours. I love working on big canvases and the smell of turpentine, despite my room being quite small. It’s just my room, and I quite enjoy it. It’s warm, which I think is an important thing in your studio. You want to feel secure in it, as it’s the master of your domain, for lack of a better phrase. My creative processes are both spur of the moment and planned, as I want everything to be a choice rather than a necessity.

What are your favourite artistic mediums, and how do you integrate them into your art?

I paint pretty much exclusively in oils. I really enjoy the textural nature of it, and I really like things to have physicality. I’m really old-fashioned — I find acrylic doesn’t ever bring the depth of oil that colour does. For me, it’s all about colour, and the intricacies of the ways that colour plays with each other. I love painters who use really thick oil and have this lovely textural element. My favourite paintings are the ones you want to eat — like you want to cut a big slice off and just eat it.

What are some of the key themes and motifs that you explore in your art?

For as long as I’ve been painting now, I’ve been trying to work out colour relations. They’re just so infinitely complicated, delicate, and basically just magic. A lot of the portraits I do are inspired by Gwen John, who is just a goddess of mixing colours, and having very minimal saturation. When you see it in person, they’re never very eye-catching — they’re actually quite dull — but there’s this really rich harmony in the colours. It’s sort of magical. Maybe I’m simpleminded, but I don’t really think about the themes of the art that I’m creating. To me, it’s just a physical medium on a canvas that has extension, colour and all that sort of stuff. That’s the level I involve myself with that. Maybe in a year’s time, I’ll have really clever themes going on, but it’s mainly about paint on a canvas to me.

What are/were some of the key influences in your art? How have they inspired your art and creative processes?

That’s a very good question. Personally, my parents were very big influences. They were always really big on taking us to museums, so I’ve always grown up going to art galleries and seeing art that you can enjoy. It is glorious! My favourite painter as a boy — and really today — is Caravaggio. I also love the drama and opera of his Medusa painting. I know a lot of my paintings are completely different — they are not at all exciting, they’re quite dull and sort of tepid colour things going on — but I think you can’t really top the drama of that. I’m always a big lover of sort of Renaissance. I’m sort of really old fashioned and a man out of time. I should have been born 500 years ago. I also love Impressionist artists and all of that. I just think the way they use paint as a medium is incredible. It really changes how you understand what paintings are. I think I’ve also mentioned Gwen John. She’s a supremely underrated painter now. Again, the way she uses colour is just incredible. I have her in my head all the time when I’m painting and the lovely, sort of delicate notes going on. Someone like Joshua Reynolds also influences me as well. If you think about portraiture, he sort of sets the tone of it.

There is also an incredible painting called Seamus Heaney by Tai-Shan Schierenberg, who hosts Portrait Artist of the Year. You might have seen him on your televisions. It’s huge, and it’s in the National Portrait Gallery, and it’s amazing. There’s also Frank Auerbach, who does incredible portraits — in fact, I have a book by him. They’re so thick, and they take hundreds of hours to paint, but they are incredible. And obviously you have someone like Picasso, who just uses paint in a way that’s just incredible. Basically every good artist inspires me.

How do you deal with creative blocks?

I get incredibly frustrated. It really emotionally affects me. One of my paintings took me about a month — the entirety of December was just gone. I was miserable the whole time, because I’d start it, I’d do some work, and I’d go “ugh, this doesn’t look right,” and it wasn’t until the final couple of days that I’d feel a bit happier with this. I just become miserable — that’s just how I deal with it. That’s why I mainly paint myself, because I get tyrannical when I’m painting somebody. I just get very internally frustrated, and I keep going. I did a great big painting and the heads weren’t really coming out right, so I just cut them out of the painting with a little knife. That’s my go-to: if something doesn’t work, I’ll cut it out.

Are there any specific routines or rituals you follow when making art?

I didn’t, but I do now. I think if you don’t have routine with something like oil, then you’re just setting yourself up to fail. Your brushes and palette will all get caked over and your paint will all dry. It will just be miserable and you won’t be able to paint well. I really like being sporadic and inventive, but there is a reason why there is a certain routine for working out the line and the form, and then moving on to colour and things like that. I have an artist playlist as well, but it feels like I shouldn’t listen to music because the music will influence my art.

I’m also quite regimented in the way I approach paint. I only use four paints on my palette, because I think it’s really important to start off mixing your colours, so I’ll spend hours and hours sat mixing. I think it’s Gwen John’s teacher in Paris who said “your painting is finished on the palette. That’s how you should think about it.” All your moves are on the palette, and painting is just filling in the blanks.

Any tips for artists in university?

I have an exact answer for this, because it’s what I’ve done in the last week. St Andrews doesn’t have a proper fine arts course, but you can find the books they teach with at the proper fine arts courses in the library. You can go borrow them and teach yourself art. I only discovered this last summer. I did a course in art school that really just changed the way I approach painting. It was so invaluable. I’m just really old-fashioned, but it’s just technique, technique, and technique. It may not be the most interesting thing in the world, but there is a reason why it’s important. I have a sketchbook — the first half of it is just me painting cubes, geometric patterns, and shapes. I think if you don’t have your fundamentals down, then everything else won’t work. What has helped me is to just work on basic technique.

Pictures of Iain’s Studio