Artist's Statement
I am fascinated by exploring the pull within the Self between vulnerability and potency.
How do we allow both qualities to co-exist?
How do we protect ourselves, yet not become smothered and stuck?
How do we move in the world as vibrant, active free agents, yet not be struck down by the dangers that we encounter?
The paint acts as a metaphor for this struggle. It can be clear, decisive, and strong. Vivid colours are vibrant and confrontational. Paint can reveal, can make clear. Paint also bleeds, it seeps, it threatens to overwhelm. It can be fuzzy, ambiguous and imprecise. Paint can hint at something, can make veiled allusions; it can also be bold and non-negotiable.
The figures shown are young: at an age of transition and growing self-awareness. There is a heady mix of powerful desires, physical and otherwise, great energy, a sense of being inviolate and perhaps immortal, and enormous potential; co-existing with a flip-side: vulnerability, uncertainty, anxieties, and an only partially-formed sense of self.
Each painting in the most recent series of work shows a face, looking out at, or just beyond, the viewer, sometimes with a disarmingly frank and open gaze. We see, in paint, an image of a person; but simultaneously, for me, at least, there may be almost a shudder of recognition, a resonance with an inner sense of self. There is the paradox of feeling that one sees one’s own ‘inner’ in another’s ‘outer’.
Here is an exploration: how can I see ‘myself’ in an image which is, apparently, of someone else? Yet because I do not work from models, or from photographs, here is not an actual ‘someone else’; all the faces and figures are inventions, or at least drawn from deep within a subconscious well of impressions gained over a lifetime (or genetic memory? -who knows?). Me and not-me.
In painting I am influenced by J.M.Turner, Abstract Expressionist painters such as Helen Frankenthaler and Arshile Gorky, elements of Symbolism, Surrealism and Neo-Expressionism (particularly Georg Baselitz and Maria Lassnig), and other contemporary artists such as Peter Doig, Marlene Dumas, Shani Rhys James and the late Ken Kiff.
Writers on painting that I admire include James Elkins (particularly 'What Painting Is', Routledge, 2000) and Edward Lucie-Smith.
My method of working, in which each painting becomes a response to initial random marks on the canvas, has something in common with the techniques of Victor Hugo and Max Ernst.
Emma Cameron, July 2009