Artist Hazel Saville
I discovered my love of art when I was 17, when I was going through a period of depression. Playing with colour took me to another, more wholesome dimension. It became my passion.
Art was pushed out by work and other commitments from about age 24. I came back to it again in a big way in 2008. From 2009 to 2010 I did a number of local art courses run by the Extramural Department of Aberystwyth University.
In my previous career, I worked for 10 years as a social worker, in London and South Wales. I have worked as a hypnotherapist, healer and workshop leader since 2000. Over the last 10 years I have majored in art and left most of the therapy work to my husband Peter, who is also an accredited hypnotherapist.
In 2010 I set up my art business, Golden Hill Art and was awarded an EU grant to convert dilapidated buildings adjacent to our farmhouse into an art studio and gallery complex. It was wonderful to have so much space to paint and to display my work.
As an artist, it’s a joy for me to create something new. My artwork is intuitive. Mostly now it is shaped by an interaction between the support I’m working on, e.g paper, canvas etc.; the colours I use; the feelings I have about the colours and the ideas I want to convey. Basically, I paint the way I feel. The interaction of the colours with my feeling is of prime importance to me and the style is secondary to what I feel will make the painting work.
I believe strongly in the need to deal with the ecological challenges facing us, the whole of humanity and our home planet Earth. Scientists say this is the age of the sixth great extinction of life on earth, most of it caused by human greed and mismanagement.
I also feel that when we find our inner light and beauty and embody it, then our interactions with life and the world we live in will also change. Partly my art reflects this and the fact that amidst all the troubles of the world we live in, there is still beauty, colour and light all around us waiting for us to connect to.
My paintings are usually built up with layers of colour, giving a rich, textured effect. I love to create new forms inspired by the beauty of nature. The close rapport I have developed with my unconscious mind through my therapy training and work can also be seen reflected in my artwork.
It’s exciting when a viewer understands the feelings I bring into my work and even more so when people see things that I must have woven into the picture at an unconscious level, things that move the person to real appreciation.
I am also a harpist, songwriter, poet and gardener, although now, art leaves me with little time for the first three of these things.
This is what an eloquent admirer of my work wrote:
“We are all on a journey in life… just as light takes time to travel to create life, so we all travel on a journey to find that light… a light that transforms our banal world into a rich tapestry of colour, which vibrates with the richness of life, sings with harmonies and beats with a pulse of joy in a world which would otherwise be dull with monotony. In her art Hazel vibrates the culmination of that journey in a riotous celebration of colour.”
