Trained at Edinburgh College of Art and The Royal Drawing School in London, where she won the Machin Foundation Prize, Tyga uses nature as a metaphor for feelings of being overwhelmed. She couples minute observation of the teeming forest floor – where the emerald green of a bramble leaf sits in stark juxtaposition to an array of cold blue silver leaves – with the flux and movement of unceasing growth. She switches from the micro to macro and a particularly favourite subject is a clump of Douglas firs near where she lives which she views from underneath, highlighting their dark and jagged canopy against the azure sky.
‘The untidy areas are the exciting bits,’ says Tyga who lives on the Wiltshire Downs where she seeks out the uncultivated corners of fields or patches of woodland floor to paint. ‘Things really do spring up in one day and everything constantly shifts around,’ she says. ‘Grasses and brambles make way for animals; a shoot is there one day and gone the next because an animal has eaten it. A mushroom suddenly appears from nowhere. Everything is in a relationship with everything else.’
A rising star in the new British Landscape movement her works embodies an awakening to the importance of the ground beneath our feet.
Although Tyga lives and works in the UK she won an Erasmus scholarship to study at the L’Ecole Nationale Superieue des Arts Decoratifs in Strasbourg and for more than a year taught at the International Institute for Arts, Modinagar in India.
Her work is held in held in a number of important collections including the Royal Collection.
No.7 Tyga Helme Up Our Street 8 Holland Street's Neighbours
by Tom Morris
Spotlight Feature: Tyga Helme brings the outside in
The Wick by by Ocki Magill
Q. What first inspired your practice?
Looking back to when I was a child, I loved playing alone, hiding under trees making dens in bushes. I have managed to keep doing this, having always found inspiration in being alone in nature. I always loved scribbling over any piece of paper I could find and still get a thrill putting marks on paper… but perhaps something really clicked seeing Constable’s small landscape studies at the V&A as a teenager… such tiny works, so beautifully drawn… I remember that rush of excitement of feeling what paint could do.
Q. What has been your background / training and how influential has that subsequently been?
I studied Fine Art at Edinburgh College of Art in a joint course with History of Art at Edinburgh University. I was quite confused by the disparity between the two worlds and felt a little alienated by art school by the end of it. I did, however, do a very memorable drawing course on my Erasmus term in Strasbourg with the painter Roger Dale. It was a life drawing class but not as I had experienced life drawing before, we had to question our looking and ways of seeing and responding. It opened up a world of possibilities in drawing for me and was a huge catalyst for me applying to the Royal Drawing School’s drawing year after university. I am so grateful to the teaching I received at the Royal Drawing School, surrounded by people who took drawing seriously and were open to the huge number of directions it can take. Along with the teaching opportunities after, and their residencies, it ultimately gave me the confidence to just go for it.
Q. Tell me more about your subject matter and the inspiration for your work?
Over the last few years, I have been very drawn to foliage, to undergrowth and hedgerows. They might be next to a road or in the corner of a garden but, in focussing in on them, they become whole worlds, I think of them as little slices of wildness. I like the rhythms and patterns found in growth and decay and the dance of the spaces between the leaves. Drawing the minutiae can feel like an exploration of opposing ideas; of calm then chaos, of awkwardness then ease, of known and unknown. You think you understand what you are looking at one minute and then
feel completely lost the next. This is what I always seem to look for when I start, for a feeling of being lost, I want to feel like I have no idea how to begin. I guess some writers have described it as the sublime in nature.
Q. You work both en plain air and in the studio? How does the work develop between these environments?
I work faster and with more urgency outside, I seem to get to a place of happy accidents and surprises which is exciting. All the sense are involved, temperature, noise, touch and light all come into the work. Then in the studio things slow down a little which allows me to think more about memory and colour away from the subject. I think things become a little more distilled, but there is a perfect balance for me between the two as I need to frequently go back to drawing from life to keep a freshness and energy.
Q. You return to particular spots in the natural world and carefully observe the minutia of detail, for example, an area of undergrowth or brambles. Is this appreciation of the micro a means of understanding the macro?
Ooh maybe. I think I see it as a constant reminder that nothing can be fully understood and nothing can surpass nature, all we can really do is being in wonder.
Q. The quality of gestural mark-making is evident in your practice. Tell me more about the significance of mark-making processes for you?
I think mark making is my way into describing the rhythms and connections between things. There is a tempo which I can speed up or slow down and keep the eye moving around.
Q. Who or what has been your greatest influence as an artist? Which artists most inspire you?
I have drawn a lot from Vuillard, I am particularly in love with his sense of pattern, and Bonnard for his use of colour and memory. I always go back to Degas’ landscape monoprints, with chance and accident coupling with his incredible draftsmanship… and Morandi for the endless poetry found in the same subject. I seem to get more from today’s romantics rather than the more political environmental works, like Thomas Hammick and a painter I have just discovered,
Maja Ruznic, whose use of colour to explore emotions and memory I have been finding totally mesmerising. I am also inspired by reading, Nan Shepherd’s ‘The Living Mountain’ a favourite about how we encounter nature and our relationship with it.
Q. What is the most challenging element of your practice?
Weather and sore back! But, also trying to keep the work evolving, constantly questioning why I’m doing things, to ensure I don’t fall into comfortable familiar ways of working. I also want the work to be relevant to today’s issues, but I also think I have to accept my way is quiet and hopefully there is power in that.
Q. You work in a variety of media. How do these different processes relate in your practice?
The pastels and inks allow me to work really fast. There is also a drama in trying to get things down ‘right’ the first time, which gives me an intensity while I work with them. My more recent use of oil paint has allowed me to go back and constantly shift things around. It feels very different mixing me own colours, the process has to become slower, and it has made me think harder about colour.
Q. You often work in panel format? What, for you, is the appeal of this particular format?
The panels are really for my own process, they allow me to work on small portable pieces at a time, which gives me a lot of focus without worrying about the whole and allows the piece to grow indefinitely.
Q. Acute observational focus is central to your work. With this mind, can you reflect and expand on the role of drawing in your practice?
Maggi Hambling says she draws to shed away herself and allow the subject to come to the fore. I love this idea, it sounds a lot like when I’m in flow. Drawing has this ability to connect me to nature, to the sensations it offers, more than anything else. It’s like a meditation, trying to surrender as much as possible to what I’m looking at, with little agenda, allowing myself to be surprised, to see more. Someone (I can’t remember this moment who) talks about drawing’s ability to connect the head, the
hand, and the heart. I stop worrying about what I’m doing and why I’m doing it, I’m just doing it.
Q. What for you are the desired essential qualities of image-making?
Feeling. The subject needs to be felt… and then anything goes.
Q. How do you see your work relating to traditional and/or contemporary art practice?
I feel more akin to a more British romantic tradition in painting, from Constable and Turner to Tacita Dean. Today I look to the painters Maja Ruznic, Cecily Brown and Julie Mehretu. All painters and all women.
Q. How do different environments, seasons, weathers etc inspire you?
The constant changes give me an urgency when I’m working but also reminds me how I can’t hold onto anything, nothing is fixed and no one place will ever be the same. I can come back to the same spot again and again and feel like I’m getting to know it all over again.
Q. What are the latest developments in your work?
I am trying to do bursts of work entirely from memory, thinking about colour and sensation. Right now I am doing small oil monoprints of birds and mountains using a very limited palette, I’ll attach a pic.
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