I’ve been immersing myself in recent work, on paper, allowing myself to wallow and float and reconsider what’s happening in the expressing of my lived and felt experience in my paintings. You can glimpse some of the paintings here.
out from under the table and out of the box
Paintings on paper have been piling up under the tables and I decided it was time to give them some undivided attention and notice what’s going on. That led to getting out more paintings on paper from the store room – all those made since I came back from Berlin in 2017. There’s something distinctive about this body of work that I needed to (re)clarify for myself.
It’s not simply that they are on paper - heavy watercolour paper that takes acrylic so beautifully. They are what I called “dynamic paintings” (see here for a description of the process and earlier examples), and are often accompanied by writing of short poetic texts. Some of them become what might more accurately be called painting~poems.
Reading about Gestalt psychotherapy has given me another way to think about dynamics in these paintings – as the interplay between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’. What is figure and what is ground changes continually as the painting progresses - sometimes the figure is, just that, a figure, and at other times the figure is colour and/or form. I paint in order to resolve figure and ground into some kind of unity or harmony. I continue painting until that feeling of unity prevails across the whole painting.
Listening, acrylic on paper, 84 x 61 cm. Lynne Cameron, 2020