‘looking out looking in’

‘Developing Creative Practice’ at the Studio Pavilion, House for an Art Lover in February 2022. The workshop allowed each artist to develop strategies in advancing their studio practice with an emphasis on building a community invested in sharing and discussing ideas. 

Working in this beautiful studio/ exhibition space, I challenged myself to create some site-specific work. 

I wanted to explore the notion of paintings installed within the architectural space having a direct dialogue with works located within the adjacent walled gardens. 

‘re- imaginings’

re-imaginings on paper

 ‘You will learn the most from looking back at your work, and by looking back you will discover how to go forward…’ 

Bea Feitler, Brazilian designer, art director.

 The subject is the landscape. Working within the studio and from Greenock workshops there are familiar elements of the landscape appearing in these works: rolling hills, still water of the river Clyde, early dawn, cusp of duskness, capturing an atmosphere, conveying a sense of the more ethereal essence of a particular landscape.

These works on paper focus on composition as a way of re-imagining new and existing work. Working with the frame to capture a composition, the other pieces of the original art work were reconfigured to create a new harmonious collage. The two pieces are considered as a diptych (frame and collage) sitting side by side in dialogue with each other.

Working in black and white on paper and experimenting with liquid graphite, the medium helps to convey an esoteric landscape, flickering light, moving shadow, drawing the viewer in and hinting at this re-imagined landscape.

Curator - Fraser Taylor, August 2021 http://thetextilecollective.com

‘Echoes of wanderings’

These paintings were produced in lockdown when access to most landscape was restricted. The paintings attempt to be visual reminders of particular memories, after-images or echoes of wanderings through landscapes.

Like memories the subjects of these paintings are sketchy, echoes of an image, parts of images, in and out of focus, incomplete, scale and perspective are repeatedly changing, blurring the edges, not entirely accurate and with few details.  

 Using a freshly created painting, I sought to create echo elements, hidden landscapes of that first image in subsequent stolen fragments that are a ghost of the original, now overworked or destroyed. Each echo print has a familial relationship with the original more gestural painting

Anne Goldrick

‘Anne Goldrick’s new body of work ‘Echoes’ considers the application of paint on two dissimilar surfaces. Paint is applied to a ridged wooden panel with a loaded brush, scraped with a spatula, dragged by a rag, or dusted with powdered graphite. 

Moves are made quickly and layers of varying density appear. While the paint is wet a sheet of fine transparent paper is gently placed on top of the painting. The artists hand gently rubs the back of the paper and when the paper is pealed back an echo of the painted image appears. 

The echo reveals a transferred mirror image lifting the residue of the unsettled surface of the painting. The print exposes the construction of the work making visible lines of thick excavated paint and shadows of undefined forms. The surface is not altered, exposing the absorbed trace of Goldrick’s gestural painting.

The two opposing surfaces sit side by side in dialogue with each other. The intense painted surface of the wooden panel in contrast with the spare marks on the paper, both revealing images which infer translations of landscapes.’

Curator - Fraser Taylor, August 2021 http://thetextilecollective.com

‘In absentia’

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 sensations 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.

With thanks to : Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot

It has been exhilarating witnessing the evolution of Anne Goldrick’s paintings. Anne’s work interrogates a worthy history of abstract gestural painting and examines her frank relationship to landscape. The intimacy and scale of the paintings demand a slow examination of the surface, grappling with the subtle tones and forms, enforced by the effort of a paint laden brush, spatula or rag. Anne’s nerve, focus and pleasure in painting is embedded in every mark. 

Fraser Taylor, Curator. http://thetextilecollective.com

Glimpses

This body of work breaks with the notion of the carefully constructed view and instead offers fleeting glimpses and reflections exactly as they may be encountered on a journey through a landscape. 

Scale and perspective are repeatedly changing so that one moment a fragment of landscape (flower/heather/grass/rock/stream) is in sharp focus and the next the ‘whole’ (distant field/ streambed /ravine /mountain) emerges. Exploring different aspects of one place/plane through different panels at a micro and macro distance, slow and fast movement, conveying a passage of time within the one piece.

Flickering light and moving shadow draw the viewer in and hint at the rhythm of the journey accompanied by an everchanging horizon.