GILLIAN RICHARDS
LANDSCAPE ABSTRACTIONS
JANUARY 14 – FEBRUARY 4, 2023
Gillian Richards was the first artist we featured in our Artist Spotlight Series which began in 2020. We catch up with Gillian in her studio to talk about new developments in her urban landscape paintings. In these new small abstracts Richards explores colour relationships using collaged cut-outs which she layers over the painted image.
The cut-outs are made up of what she calls “odd” colours of paint swatches she sourced from a hardware store. Richards experiments with splintering the images into fragments and rearranging the parts creating surprising and unexpected spatial relationships. Through this process she seeks to retain the mood of her representational approach to the urban landscape by allowing fragments of imagery to flicker amidst shapes and fields of colour.
“CLIPPED”, collage and acrylic on panel, 20″ x 16″, Sold
“Working on the same smooth, synthetic paper the initial paintings were done on, I painted numerous sheets in various colours. This process was a second part of the exercise in making these collages: to explore new colour relationships using colours I would not normally mix from my usual palette and place them against the painted imagery. The choices were inspired from a selection I made of “odd” or “ugly” colours from a wall of decorator paint swatches at a hardware store. Composing with these swathes of colour offered a counterpoint of stillness to the activity of the imagery they were set against.”
“While the act of slicing up imagery and rearranging it disorients and recontextualizes the original subject, it also serves to create new and implied narratives that I am excited to explore further in my painting.”
