Hello! Welcome to my page. My name is Maria Pelton and I am a London based artist. www.mariapelton.com

Subject matter

My work is a combination of quirky, strange, unexpected and sometimes sinister characters that emerge and develop from looking at unusual oddities of shapes in nature and in inanimate objects. I am inspired by imagining their different personalities and worlds and seeing how random juxtapositions appear from combining them together. I am interested in how a shape, object or creature can inherit a life and personality on the page, believing that they can have an imagined persona. These representations within my work are a mischievous reflection of the variety of human personalities and characters found in everyday life.

Creative process

I mainly use watercolours and ink on paper, however I also love to experiment with other types of medium as well. Throughout my work I enjoy using strong contrasts of colour to add drama, which I find visually stimulating to me. My creative process involves collecting inspiration from a variety of source materials, from drawing from life, to using my own drawings, to looking at other artists’ work. These objects and imagery are then transformed into my drawings. I find working in a series helps to develop my ideas and creates energy and flow within my finished work. I am currently interested in accidental outcomes and random surprise. Which are created through a process of adding drawings to a page, so that the composition develops at random as the drawing progresses, without any rearranging or editing.