Song of Summer
Statement
Created in 2014 while on exchange in the south of France at the Villa Arson, Nice. Surrounded by the French countryside, French cuisine, the blue of the Cote d’Azure and the colours of French Mediterranean architecture. The south of France was home to many of the artists and early exhibitions of the French movement “supports/surfaces” which reflected on painting itself and questioned painting’s basic components.
This body of work saw an expansion of palette, a return to traditional painterly supports, and an interest in both deconstruction and in painting itself as a subject. These works were painted predominately in acrylic on linen. Watery acrylic created bold gestures and splatters evoking abstract expressionism and the quintessential “painterly mark”. These marks were often paired with trompe l’oeil elements for example, creating false shadows, faux-stretcher bars referencing the painting’s underlying structure, or airbrushing folds and wrinkles on the linen surface to emphasized materials. The result was a body of work that is at once playful, referential, self-aware and self-questioning.
