Peony Gent is layering materials to create drawings that are “chewy and rich” in texture

“I’m really interested in playing with the form of things – to see how I can create my own visual shorthand for how I experience the world,” says Peony Gent, an artist who does “a little bit of everything”: quilts, murals, and experimental comics alongside working as a lecturer at Camberwell College of Arts.

“Nature lends itself really nicely to this kind of experimentation due to how endless the inspirations are, and how far you can push the limits of how much you can abstract a tree or a flower with it still being recognisable,” she says, speaking about her series of drawings inspired by green spaces and street scenes near her home in south London. The illustrator often takes her sketchbook down to Burgess Park in Camberwell, or for a stroll down Walworth Road, capturing little snippets of abstracted flatblocks and nature scenes around Southwark.

Her newer, grid-like works are a continuation of the comics she’s produced over the years. “Rather than being just one image, most of them are composed of a collection of different ‘panels’ pushed together, creating an impression of all these different elements that combine to create how I perceive a location at a particular time.”

Recently, Peony has started to combine pastels with acrylic gouache. This achieves a texture she describes as “chewy and rich”, while still feeling like a drawing rather than painting – “a skill I am very bad at”, she says. “Something I always tell my students is ‘if it’s fun for you to make it will almost always be fun to look at’. Sometimes I can catch myself getting too controlled and obsessed over wanting the end product to look ‘good’, which is when the images I’m making come out poorly.”

Peony plans to expand this series into larger pieces, in different locations, and by adding even more layers of texture to achieve the aforementioned ‘chewyness’. Like all of her projects, the results are always uncertain, but “we’ll see where it goes!” the illustrator ends.