"echos of the daintree"

ëThere is a paradox. Painting as such is abstract. Yet the power of that abstraction is its capacity to render the outside world visible ...!í (Patrick Heron -My Painting: 30th August 1987).

In 1996 I was awarded the Bartlet Travel Scholarship and visited Australia. Here I had an opportunity to absorb the influences of Sydney, the city that had so inspired Patrick Heron. Heron had been Artist in Residence of the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney from 5th November 1989 to 28th February 1990. Infatuated by brightness of the antipodean summer light, the vivid colours and strangeness of the flora of the Botanical Gardens, he produced in total, fifty two fresh invigorating and beautiful paintings.

Influenced by these paintings and Heronís enthusiasm, I visited Sydney and the Botanical Gardens and also travelled to the East Coast to see some the of the beautiful and natural phenomena that Australia has to offer. The Great Barrier Reef and the wonders of the Daintree Forest. These places have provided me with unsurpassable amounts of spiritual, visual and emotional information from which I have been working from over the last eight months.

My show demonstrates and follows the outcome of of my experiences and show the internalisation and reaction to them now working in my studio in Newcastle. The paintings also represent my love for painting; the quality of paint and how I use them as a vehicle for communication.

Each painting is very personal and is often a combination of specific emotional events and wider general feelings of the time or of the places I visited. My emotions, the qualities of space, light, beauty and diverse combinations of unusual and exotic qualities and appearance of Nature have been the starting points for the paintings.

It is through my paintings that I depict the world that I wish to be in. Some reality and the rest pure desirability, using the ever astounding qualities of nature to feed and inspire me.

margaret adams | nur balkir | marion curle | julian davies | helen evans | beverlee foulkes | joe hewlett | j.m.quinn

 

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