Acrylic, ink, Japanese paper on cradled birch panel (2023)
Size: w 24″ x h 12″ x d 1.5″
The Northern White Rhino is on the verge of extinction but efforts to engineer the revival of the species are generating excitement. According to The Guardian (Dec2022): “Scientists who collected semen and eggs from the last living members of the rhino species hope to be able to implant embryos into a cousin of the northern white rhino as part of nascent repopulation efforts which, if successful, would be unprecedented.”
Acrylic, pastel, ink, Japanese paper on canvas (work in progress, 2022)
Size: w 30″ x h 15″ x d 1.5″
This painting began as a simple study of white clouds across a blue sky, with of course my two Nereid friends present leaping from one to the next. I decided it needed more colour, texture and complexity. The above detail is roughly 6″ x 4″, so I have a bit yet to do.
Acrylic, ink, crayon, mesh netting on canvas (2021)
Size: w 16″ x h 10″ x d 1.75″
Why Paint? That is the question asked of members of the Organization of Kingston Women Artists. Those in the group who choose paint as their medium have responded and their work will be exhibited in a show at Art Noise Gallery, Kingston, Canada (https://www.artnoise.ca/gallery.html) from 24 June to 07 August 2021. My contributions to this show include this piece as well as Nereids in the Garden of Hippocampus (https://npaulartworks.com/2021/01/13/nereids-in-the-garden-of-hippocampus/).
Nereids Reach the Deep Sea Floor started with an impulse to play – with pigment, mediums, collage – with paint. Over time and iterations I came to understand at last where it was going and brought in the Nereids and their friends: the luminescent, fanged creatures of the dark mountainous world that is the bottom of the ocean. Monstrous in appearance to us, it is they who are under threat, endangered because of the commercial fishery practice of bottom trawling. (Present here: Dragonfish (x2), anomuran, coelacanth, hatchet fish, fangtooth (x2), anglerfish, viperfish (x2), predatory tunicate, frilled shark, gulper eel (x2), tube-eye.)
Hippocampus: part of the brain associated with memory, thought to resemble a seahorse.
The starting point for this painting was an image of the hippocampus obtained by means of antibody staining by Thomas Deerinck and Mark Ellisman (2004), reproduced in Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. My sea dragon (barely discernible, certainly not recognizable, in any case upside down) inhabits an underwater garden of memory, dream and desire.
Acrylic, graphite and coloured gesso on birch panel
Nereids Join (II)
Size (each): 8″ x 8″ x 1.6″
Nereids Join (III)
In my Nereids series of paintings, a tiny pair of luminous elven-like figures explore at my behest distant lands, seas and sky, the underworld and the tops of mountains; they are the agents of my empathetic imagination. The fifty Nereids of Greek mythology were gentle, unremarkable maidens who lived at the bottom of the sea. In my work they exemplify the humility needed to understand, to connect.
“Nereids Join La Danse” I, II, and III, with a nod to Henri Matisse in particular, celebrate artists of integrity great and small. They will be on display at the Isabel Bader Centre, Art and Media Lab, Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada (March 16-27) as part of the exhibit “The Politics of the Artist’s Footprint” https://www.facebook.com/events/125247775582098/
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