Autumn Newsletter, St Pantelone, Venice

Welcome to my autumn newsletter. I’ve been hard at work painting two large, new canvases showing figures flying up towards the oculus in the ceiling vault of the Pantheon in Rome.For inspiration I’ve been looking at the paintings of Tintoretto, Tiepolo, Raphael and Veronese, but most importantly, the work of Jacopo Pontormo, whose exhibition at the Scuderie del Quirinale in Rome I can’t wait to see.

https://scuderiequirinale.it/en/exhibition/pontormo/

First I wanted to look back at a recent trip I made to Venice and the art I saw there that has been informing my work. In fact I can condense that inspiration down to one work and that’s at the Baroque Church of Saintt Pantalone (Saint trousers) in Venice. The ceiling was painted by Giovanni Antonio Fumiani between 1680 and 1704 and it’s considered to be the largest painting on canvas in the world. The chaotic energy and inelegant flight paths of the angels in Fumiani’s masterpiece strongly influenced my recent canvases.

My two recent paintings.

To explain something about the impetus behind my work.

You can see that I am creating something contemporary, with reference to art history that i am passionate about. With some expert tuition, I learn from the colour choices and techniques, as well as the thinking behind the paintings that I love. I will also refer to some philosophy that has great relevance to my own research so you can see that, while your familiarity with it is not required, there is depth to the thinking behind my work. How I create paintings standing on the shoulders of others, rather than just trying to create something new.

I create a world in which I find freedom and can fly. With a dance background, I naturally use the movement of my body as source material. The paintings are based on self portraits that I use as reference, stretched and twisted through a serpentine, somewhat Mannerist lens, flying though my favourite Roman ceiling vaults. I ally myself with the feminist philosopher, Hélène Cixous, with her imperative that women create their own language and fly with it, using their bodies as source material.

After immersing myself in the language of Italian Mannerist and Baroque Paintings and architecture I discovered the applicable, philosophical work of Giles Deleuze ‘The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque’. He created a theory in which everything is connected, everything is a fold, Baroque folds having the quality that they can continue into infinity. In Deleuze ‘On Painting’ he identifies Mannerism as the secret forces behind things, deepening my understanding of how distortions have the potential to carry more truth than realism.

I create a language of hope for people in the process of distilling what’s most important in their lives, rising wiser from their losses and the heaviness of the world, providing a space to cultivate joy and liberation.

I plan to send out another newsletter based on the Rome trip soon. 

Have a great week.