Wendy Stokes - Margie Sheppard - Leigh Warren - Group Exhibition: Painting & etchings - Friday 4 November - Saturday 26 November 2022

Flower in the Wind, Notations of Memory

I choose to create images which bring forth the integrity of experience and the honesty of self.

We tend to think of landscapes as affecting us most strongly when we are in them or on them, when they offer us the primary sensation of touch and sight. But there are also the landscapes we bear with us in absentia, those places that live on in memory long after they have withdrawn in actuality, and such places – retreated to most often when we are most remote from them – are among the most important landscapes we possess.  [1] Robert McFarlane

These recent works pay homage to their origins; drawing from an eclectic set of gardens carrying meaningful connections to personal history, which hint at metaphorical relationships toward simplicity, strength, resilience, fragility and renewal.

The diverse locations from which these memories are traced are landscapes saturated in light and space, often connected to gardens of childhood and the fluid coastal environs of adult life. My rural childhood home with its beautiful garden was deleted by fire not long after leaving with my parents in the mid 1960s. In the years that followed, the land lay vacant, the footprint dissolved, while some trees remained as sentinels. This may seem a simple notion of moving on, but for me has held emotional weight as both my parents died before I barely ventured into adulthood. Recently too through divorce, I have been uprooted of my home of 30 years. Gardens have been a constant, providing a space for nurture, familiarity and renewal, whether they be my own or those visited. A residency in the 1990’s in the Hamptons, New York, but more recently Monet’s garden in Giverny, and frequently visited as part of a Cite des Arts residency, triggered both memory and a renewed interest which continues to provide extension of these important ideas.

I am interested in capturing the simplicity of structure and rhythms of such places; reducing the experience to raw mark suggestive of both the psychological and geographical essence of site; the works becoming spaces of intimacy, familiarity and nurture. While colour and gesture may allude to a range of vegetation and location, each work possesses an independent identity. No one work fixes a singular site or time, but instead explores a collective layering of responses and associations, keeping interpretation open and fluid.

1 Robert McFarlane Pg 198 The Old Ways Penguin; 2012

 

Artist's Statement

I had the opportunity to study printmaking about 30 years ago, having previously specialised in painting at art school in the early 70s. There were many years back then when I worked exclusively as a printmaker but now both practices, painting and printmaking, hold different, but equally strong attractions for me. The labour of etching, inking, scratching, burnishing steel, layering colours and proofing make each print hard won but worthwhile.

This exhibition shows the prints of the last seven or eight years and the transition to the most simple forms, thus the leaving behind of the figuration of my previous work. The etchings are purely abstract and are investigations of colour and spatial relationships, through the use of geometrical forms, shape and texture.…the possibilities are limitless.

(Please contact gallery for additional editions of these etchings.)

 

Artist's Statement

At first glance my work appears to be abstract, but as I look back at each completed work, it is in some way autobiographical. A ‘brain pic’ of what was happening in life at the time. I never set out to paint something concrete, it’s a process of allowing the intuition to override the intellect, to surrender to the act of painting and discover something I haven’t seen before.

Each painting is like a puzzle to be solved and is never straightforward. The beginning is always the biggest challenge; finding the colour and the dynamic of the first layer is inevitably a nerve racking, yet exciting experience. For the most part, it starts with a single colour; I start seeing that colour in my mind’s eye, then I try to make it. Once I have set the scene by applying the colour in some way, the ideas start to assemble like welcome friends, never forced, I have learnt to be patient and wait for their arrival because there’s no tangible schedule. Slowly the work starts to emerge, so at this point I must let go of control and enjoy the journey and follow where the painting takes me.

Chinese calligraphy has had a significant influence in my work, more cursive than formal characters. For me the lines and the spaces they form offer infinite possibility.