Portraiture of a Narrative Place
Encounters “Voices of Colours”
As a method painter I get dressed in the character I am going to spend the day with, arrange my remembered research as framework and work directly from life. I am creating portraits of the land personified.
“Voices of Colours” is a positive response to these bleak times. My new collection is a meditation on change – it is a life affirming wish.
I am working with windows as metaphors, exploring ideas of surface and what is beneath. My place of interest is my neighbourhood swamp. Although it is a pretty place attracting wildlife and wildlife admirers, budding flowers amongst it’s lyrical wilderness and trilling with birdsong, it is a place of decay. Beneath the reflections of the shiny blue sky lit with bubblegum clouds is murk, and creatures that are used to the dark. The underside of fallen branches are blackened and slimy, soon they will become part of the swamp. Mosquitos breed in hoards. Brilliant green clumps of grass bend delicately and the fronds are trapped in the mire. It is an analogy for change. A place of obvious visible life cycling. Flood waters wash in from the swollen river, and drain out filtered. The mouldering swamp is a womb for life to begin embryonic.
At the studio, again in character, I surround myself with the drawings and recreate a version of place. Making my musings into art I collage them with my drawings which are juxtaposed like two ribbons undulating alongside each other giving the dual narrative to my final pieces.
Every weekend in May