Ffiona Lewis Ffiona Lewis
Sligo Art Gallery
12th April 2000 - 6th May 2000
Ffiona’s new body of work almost solely concentrates on still life. With such a limited range of subject she can exploit her composition far more readily.
Each piece attempts a simple, expose. The objects are carefully considered before placing within the whole composition. These forms are flattened and of the minimum in depiction. In the larger groups their abstracted forms are required as a part of a developing pictorial language. The table top, cup, platter, pan become formal shapes with compositional functions. In the smaller group the ‘cup’ is a more detailed piece. The objects are more personal and their detail explored. She tends toward a lack of interest in the objects themselves and regards them more as shapes and colours to be manipulated in the construction of the painting.
The flat painted surface of the picture is the starting point. Rarely working on canvas the paintings are built up on timber panels, flat or in relief. The treatment of the primed board is in itself a lengthy layering process of sanding back, applying gesso primers and grounds and textured mediums. The paintings take shape by a continuous process of work, obliteration and change. The act of making gives the subject form - adding, scratching back, stretching and searching in a careful-careless way for the right statement where the tension is set up.
Tonal contrasts are emphasised; colouring tends to be monochromatic with a preference to umber’s, ochre’s and blue.
The vestigial pots and pans tend towards flat forms on a flat table. A tabletop can fill most of the picture with only a horizon like line along the top and a loose hanging base line. Great empty spaces with the objects clinging to the edges and falling over the sides are repeatedly explored, That and the overcrowded groups squashed together portraying an extreme disequilibrium and an agitated profusion of forms.
Painting from memory, Ffiona paints what she sees after a waiting time - a ripening period as the reality becomes a visual experience. |
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