Using bright colour to point...

  • 1 November 2024

Using the bright colours seemed affirmed after visiting Shane Cotton's New Painting exhibition at Gow Langsford. Since that visit, I've thought about Whitney Bedford, who I've long admired; Lissy and Rudi for their fluoro crochet art. David Benjamin Sherry I've just found.

Shane Cotton
"His new works place ancestral figures in surreal, cosmic landscapes, exploring hybridities, transformation, and the cyclical nature of history. Cotton’s paintings blend history, mythology, and technicolour imagery, reflecting on the layered, nonlinear relationship between the past, present, and future in Aotearoa." https://gowlangsfordgallery.co.nz/exhibitions/354-new-painting-shane-cotton/

David Benjamin Sherry
The exhibition continues Sherry’s exploration of psychologically resonant color photography. These landscape photographs embody the artist’s psychological reactions to the natural world, which Sherry views as under threat of ecological collapse. Similarly, the film technology used by the artist could be considered an endangered medium now facing obsolescence.
https://fraenkelgallery.com/exhibitions/david-benjamin-sherry

Veduta (Amiet Summer) 2024Ink and oil on nylinen on panelWhitney Bedford @Starkwhite
Whitney Bedford is an artist who was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, but has lived in Los Angeles, by the beach, most of her life. She feels that a constant sense of travel, a love of art history, a new rooted amazement at flora and fauna, and a fulcrum of a visible horizon line have most directed her work.

Uses styles of landcsape painters from art history, and overpaints in bright colours California flora.

Tupuārangi (in collaboration with Linda Munn), 2023Lissy and Rudi
3D sculptural artists using crochet and fluoro colours.

“For Māori, as well, it brings back those nostalgic feelings of being safe under a blanket that Nanny has made. You hear that kōrero too.
Through crochet we have come to understand the symbolism of connecting ‘loops’ and how the loops reflect the complex relationships we have with ourselves and others, and to the past, present and future.” Lissy describes crochet as “a portal of joy. We see ourselves as a prism in which the aroha of our tūpuna shines through us and is expressed in our own unique ways – like the spectrum of the rainbow. As their aroha radiates through us it is reflected back to us by the light and aroha of our communities. Our practice is grounded in one central kaupapa; to transform intergenerational trauma into deeply felt joy, one loop at a time.”
https://www.timmelville.com/artist/lissy-cole-rudi-robinson/

 

 

 

New Zealand artist living in London - Robyn Litchfield
Robyn Litchfield’s paintings are representations of sublime encounters with pristine and untouched landscapes. Drawing from archival material and personal documents relating to the early exploration and colonisation of New Zealand, Litchfield aims to reimagine and examine the experience of forays into a hitherto unknown space. She is interested in the idea of wilderness and the unknown as a terrain of the mind and as a place that induces reflexivity. Landscape becomes a ubiquitous template for exploring personal history, notions of cultural identity, alienation and a sense of belonging.

Most of her sources are photographs; archival images of early New Zealand and contemporary photographs of primeval landscape taken by herself. She applies transparent paint in expressive brushstrokes and works back into it using various implements and processes such as scraping, layering and erasure to reveal the luminous ground below. The paint mimics the emulsion on the glass plates of early photographs whose images were revealed by light shining through them. She thinks of the ground as a screen where images are projected and perceived.
https://robynlitchfield.com/about/

 

 

 

 

Other artists to explore:

Daniel Boyd
Andy Warhol
Emil Nolde - watercolour landscapes

Just notes - this article will be expanded shortly.

 

 

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