Our online exhibition shares work made during the pandemic and the first lockdown. In the conversation and texts, we tell how the work emerged and how it connects with earlier paintings. There are many connections that we didn’t have time to talk about, some of which have accompanied us over many years. So over the next week, I’ll write a little more about each of these connections for my work in blog posts. Then Alison will do something similar.
I’m starting with a set of three paintings called Disappearing Horizons that preceded those in the exhibition, and that led to the choice of colours in the monoprints and prompted that scarlet stripe.
I was living in central Christchurch in an apartment looking out on to other apartments. In the city, the horizon, where land meets sky, was not visible. I was already missing the wide horizons and indigo skies of my Scottish island, when lockdown took away my compensatory trips to the beach or the hills. In these paintings, I was recalling these disappeared horizons.
I wanted to try a very simple composition of land and sky, with a disappearing horizon between them. I painted a thick layer of gesso on to the card, and, instead of smoothing it decided to make marks into it: wider more open marks in the top ‘sky’ part; edges and rolling lines of contours in the lower part, with a nod to the ’lines’ prints of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham. Between the two, I blurred and broke up the ‘horizon’.
Once the gesso had dried, it was time for paint. I wanted indigo for the ‘sky’ and then had the idea of using burnt umber in the ‘land’ and seeing if they might mix into black along the non-horizon. Mixing on the surface needed the paint to be quite wet and the card to be tilted up and down to encourage the colours to meet and join. The randomness and uncontrollability of the mixing added to the ‘disappearing’ of the horizon.
In (3), I wasn’t satisfied with the paint and so applied another layer of gesso. As it dried, I noticed how the indigo and umber remained slightly visible, and liked this as another variation on ‘disappearing’.
Disappearing Horizons (2) gesso and acrylic paint on card, 37.5 x 27 cm, Lynne Cameron, 2020
The painted scarlet strip that goes back to paintings of fences I made several years ago after a working visit to Kenya. Its purpose was to balance both colour and the forms made by the paint on gesso. To find the place where this balance felt right, I painted card with cadmium red light, cut strips of different thicknesses and lengths, and moved them around until one of them ‘worked’. Then painted a strip in that place.
In (3), the hard edges of the scarlet needed softening and so the wet paint was sprayed with water and allowed to move, just a little, over the surface.
Disappearing Horizons (3) gesso and acrylic paint on card, 37.5 x 27 cm, Lynne Cameron, 2020
As with most of my paintings, the process involved multiple layering. There was intense looking, close up to the paint and from a distance. There were deliberate intentions and more random events - sometimes ‘happy accidents’ but more often a noticing of affordances and responding to ‘what if….?’ There was putting on and scraping or wiping off. Intuitive actions intermingled with carefully thought out decisions. There was stopping and starting again. And at some point there was a leaving be.
See the exhibition and listen to the artists in conversation here