Background
Since returning more substantially to painting in 2020, my art practice has developed loosely around the creation of oil and acrylic paintings. I spent my professional life helping others in a clinical setting to develop a visual language as a way of communicating and understanding distress. Since I left the work place, there are fewer opportunities . The art studio has become a place where I can continue to explore a range of different opportunities. It is in the art studio that I interact with my personal experiences and memories via the substance of paint, to create artworks. The consequential sharing of these objects online and in exhibitions and galleries create further opportunities for development.
Artwork
My paintings are occupied by female figures. They are portrayed as solid figures, rooted within the space and composition of the image. The people appear archaic, expressing fleeting, half memories and fuller memories. In the painting "Deja Vu" for example, my memory of the figures is fleeting, there are no shapes, only colours in the background . Other images contain more evolved memories which emerge out of previously painted figures. For example,"Mothers' Dresses" and "Ditto: Mother and Daughter", both describe fuller memories. The complexities of these two images add up and express memories about the loss of my mother. They convey something of the weight and pleasure of her legacy. These elements are expressed through my memories of her dresses and a landscape that falls and slips between two figures. All of my paintings are created using the formalities of spontaneous coloured brush marks within compositions that are constantly in flux between abstraction and figuration. It is through regular painting practice, that memories and images find form. What has been painted one day, creates a way forward for new marks, which in turn create new beginnings in another painting. The constant change and flux of my art practice described here, helps me to to define my changing interior life. Making artwork provides a space for me to locate experiences connected with the ageing process and to highlight the viewpoint; The Personal is Political.