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Christine Dack, Pete Kirby and Mick Cartwright - New Works | ||||||||||||||
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Tuesday 29 April - Sunday 11 May 2008
10am - 5pm Informal Gallery Talk with Mick Cartwright: Friday 2 May at 12.30pm
Three artists, and three very different approaches to land and seascape. Christine Dack travels widely, taking direct inspiration from each voyage, and allowing the essence of her surroundings to dictate the approach to each new body of oil paintings. On-the-spot sketches preserve the initial impressions of colour and distance, and paintings produced in the studio on her return explore the visual memories in more depth. Outer Mongolia left Chris with an enduring impression of vast distances, which she expresses through bands of horizontal colour, giving a feeling of a "desert sea, with far away sand dunes, and mountains corrugating the horizon". Venice offers a strikingly atmospheric contrast, with the crumbling textures of the backstreets and "muted, earth colours, washed-out ochres, yellows, oranges and pinks... quiet lanes and squares, a stillness of time and history, and shimmering canals reflecting colours and buildings and boats". In contrast, Mick Cartwright's paintings don't tell stories or revisit past experiences. They are made in response to the immediate moment, spontaneously and intuitively, and with direct reference to the work of artists such as Bridget Riley and Agnes Martin. "Until I start working on the image, I have little idea as to what the outcome will be. It's the journey of discovery that's exciting in its unpredictability." The analysis of the formal elements of composition, colour, tone, pattern and surface relative to the image scale is central to Mick's painting practice. "The inspiration is art, and the making of art." Pete Kirby's inventive photocollage panels suggest an episode rather than an instant, not one 'decisive moment', but a combination of moments which describe not only the view, but movement, changes of light and the passing of time. The images are an examination of the way we perceive our surroundings. "I work in the environments that I enjoy being in - where nature is the greatest influence on shaping the landscape. These areas inspire contemplation and celebration, and are represented in the pictorial traditions of landscape photography. By grouping a sequence of photographs, I find that I can express the diverse qualities of a situation and then place them in the context of the whole. The resultant scale, with its range, intricacy and dynamic gives me a work that is, I hope, both visionary and descriptive. The work is presented as collage - there is no ‘grid’ superimposed. I ask that you see each image as being above a neutral black surface, enabling the eye to be drawn to individual parts or for the composition to read as a coherent picture."
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Harbour House 2008 © |
