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In the East Anglian Daily Times, on February 10th 1996, Helen Clarke reviewed Emma Cameron's first solo exhibition at Chappel Galleries, Essex. Painting Her Dreams in Colour Emma Cameron likens her paintings to dreams. Figures emerge from soft, luminous swirls of colour, their outlines fragile against the cloudy masses. The images have the strange surreal feel as those we experience in dreams - images which feel completely natural and inevitable at the time, but can appear totally bizarre in retrospect. A child raises her arm to throw a red ball with all the intentness a five-year -old can muster in a picture called Five Years Old. Compulsion shows a colossus clutching a small red figure in its hands, its eyes fixed on it with a yearning almost akin to despair. In Moving to Calmer Ground a figure with wings is poised to land on a glowing green landscape, a rope in one hand - for what? They all seem to float, suspended, in their own mysterious world, in a way reminiscent of the work of Chagall. "I'm painting about some of the strongest themes in many of our lives: our vulnerabilities, our sense of spirit, our fears and our inner battles, our loves and our joys" Emma says. "The people in my paintings don't look like me, and I rarely intend them to. But often I will experience a shock of recognition when I look at a character I've created - somehow I've allowed a part of who I am inside to become visible. "It's an odd feeling, very much like those times when a dream fragment will seem to haunt you all day, even when you can't remember exactly what the dream was." She says the images just come to her. "Sometimes I make up stories about them afterwards, but at the time they just happen," she explains. She is keen that viewers value their own personal response to her work. "I love it when someone feels strongly drawn to a character in a particular painting. Sometimes other people's ideas are very close to my own. Sometimes - excitingly - they focus on something quite different," she says. Alongside the paintings she exhibits some superb drawings. I particularly liked her pencil drawings of male nudes, sitting, stretching, sleeping - all caught with strong, sure strokes. Emma comes from a strong artistic background. Her father is the painter Ewan Cameron; her mother is the painter Tessa Spencer Pryse, the daughter of First World War lithographer Gerald Spencer Pryse, best remembered for his striking Labour Party posters. When she started her studies at the Central School of Art she remembers tutors telling students that most of them would not be painting in ten years time. "I will be," she told herself. And this exhibition shows just how well she has kept to her resolution. "I think it must be something that is important to me," she says simply.
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