Please join me for my opening at the Carnegie Gallery on Friday, July 8 from 7pm-9:30pm. It would be lovely to see you after such a long time and share new work with you!
My new exhibition highlights the intricate Balancing Act intrinsic in life and painting. Bright details and counterpoints, in oil and collage, explore abstract but recognizable figures interwoven with their environment and each other. Their placement on canvas follows meandering paths where they let life fall into place. The settings of trees and simplified houses intermingle and overlap with the figures who nestle into each other or are alone with their thoughts. Involved in the goings on of the day, complicated by life events, figures are found grocery shopping or going out for walk, stopping for flowers and basking in bright moments. Some figures are captured juggling the shapes of their day, balancing a house on their shoulder or walk hidden in trees and flower fields.
The collages are a play of pattern, simple forms and juxtaposition. The shape and texture of the materials inform my oil painting process. The paintings include layers of mark-making intermingled with themes that are defined and then defused which adds a complicated relationship between repeating shapes and the overall composition.
The centre piece of the show, How Things Play Out, 42 x 84”, overlaps natural forms from the local environment with emotive colours and shapes and personal symbols emergent from the past couple of years. Detail below. An interplay of painted text, ideas for painting titles and key words jotted down, is surrounded with changing perspectives, dynamic figures, abstract flags and isolated events.
