Sackville - Artist Statement - 2005 Exhibition

I began painting in watercolour over 20 years ago and was inspired by such artists as Ellis Rowan and Charles Demuth, and the luminous works of J.M.W. Turner.

When I was approached to paint flowers I was intrigued by their softness, delicacy and fragility, qualities I sought to capture in everything I painted. As I continued to paint flowers over many years, I developed a great passion for them, and began to explore different ways to express their vibrant beauty.

I have always enjoyed using graphite on paper to create subtleties of form and tone, light, shade, strength and softness, particularly in portrait making. However, I find that watercolour is the ideal medium for my still life images. I love the translucency and vibrancy of watercolour, the way the colours run and blend together creating their own hues. Watercolour offers an amazing depth of tone and brilliance, as well as the softest shades, through which the white paper shines as light or is disguised. It beautifully captures the glow of porcelain, the fold of drapes and the radiant colours of fruits and flowers.

Over the years my work has become much more expansive. I have gained freedom through greater size and increased intensity of colour. Although I am occasionally tempted by other painting media, watercolour somehow maintains its hold over me.

Artist Statment: Christopher McVinish

Christopher McVinish
Re-imagining the world...

The writer Ian McEwan has said that novelists 'prowl along the borders between the invented and the actual'. The same could be said for the painter Christopher McVinish.

McVinish hunts for fragments of urban life out of which he conjures another reality.
While the genre of Contemporary Realism may sometimes distance the viewer with a cool lucidity, McVinish's work is inclusive, inviting us to speculate about the ambiguous situations he presents, at the same time reminding us of aspects of everyday life taken for granted. In doing so, he showcases the commonplace as special and suffused with potential.

Characteristic of these works is a certain stillness. These are elegant works even while they deal with the grit of our urban environment. McVinish's paintings can imply a vague feeling of disquiet, occasionally even a sense of loss - yet never a loss of hope. McVinish peoples his paintings with survivors, thinkers and observers. The suggestion of a separate reflective interior life appears to be as much the painter's intention as any relationship to 'place'. A fascination with weather assists with establishing the mood of a work, and this too often demands to be read as metaphor for a protagonist's thoughts.

But perhaps the most arresting feature common to these works is that time feels more than simply suspended - it's as if a fleeting abstract moment is continuing, like a musical note sustained.

Ideas and motifs are allowed to hover (sometimes for years) before their moment of coalescence seems 'right'. McVinish's painting methodology involves numerous time-consuming applications of paint and glazes which result not only in a substantial illusion of depth but appear to achieve the remarkable feat of painting what can't be seen, namely air itself: a palpable volume of space is created around things in the picture plane.

Intriguingly oblique, these are visual stories which linger in the mind and show us contemporary life as a kind of half-remembered dream.

Artist Statement: Philippa Blair

“STAGING PAINT” …………………… Philippa Blair 2009

Dynamic structures in these physically demanding new paintings create the dramatic ”stage’ for action and reaction and evolve from the practice of drawing as navigation-

Initially large sometimes interrupted and broken gestures with gesso and paint on canvas, taped lines and calligraphic marks map the new territory and topography from an aerial viewpoint.
Drawing the line with paint. Carving into wet surfaces. Loosening the grip of the grid
New directions from a linear and flexible infrastructure exploring polar opposites, accelerations of movement, resistance and entropy.
Weaving back and forth, uneasy harmonies of opposite forces and impossible battlegrounds. A dizzying array of choices and paths

Inspired by cinematography, dance choreography, theatre of the absurd, musical scores and the presence of Nature. A new working environment in San Pedro, Ca, with its unique light, topography, streetgrit, industrial port and transport system that never sleeps-
Improvisations in an age of anxiety, fragility. Nervous, fractured post-colonial times of friction, contested territories and natural, cultural catastrophes.
Stretching paint on canvas beyond its limits, challenging order, elusive, conceptually questioning, maintaining the artists presence.
Each painting is a seduction adventuring into the unknown

Starting from paper, roadmaps, architectural plans and recycled materials layered into ‘decollages’ then ‘blind ‘rhythmic pencil drawings of movements, speeds, interweavings and imagined structures in space
3D models from willow sticks inspired by the cane/shell navigation charts of early Polynesian seafarers who discovered New Zealand.

Physically confrontational and psychologically puzzling these complex paintings weave, cast spells, dream, fall down, standup, stutter, sing, avoid traps and regroup.
Complex’stages’ and sound tracks where painting is the main event and characters can reveal and dissolve, cropped, cut, abstracted hybrids of change and reconciliation.