A Basingstoke Gallery Exhibition
"I am interested in landscape and paint. I have been recording the landscape in Cliddesden, Hampshire, and this has usually involved regular walks, when making small paintings and drawings of the land and sky. Leonardo da Vinci once described clouds as 'bodies without surface'. I have also been looking at skies, from a cloudless blue colour, to Cumulus clouds - the low, detached, puffy clouds that develop vertically in rising mounds, domes or towers, and have generally flat bases - to Cirrus clouds, the highest of the 10 main cloud types. I have been looking at the perspectives of a picture and scale and the horizon line - where the land meets the sky. I think that the work has elements of time and change within it.
I have been experimenting with putting different materials together - paintings on canvas, photographs and digital photocopies, of different scale. I have been using the photographs as reference for the paintings, with a certain disquiet. I have found that there is a certain dilemma, as to how the photographs are used, in terms of how I am able to see the landscape. It allows me to look at detail, from the perspective of a still moment, or even a fraction of a moment, in time. There is normally, within the landscape, perpetual movement - sky, clouds, light, wind etc. The antidote to this seemed to be to show the photographs. I have also been looking at the application of the paint itself and tools - brushes, palette knives, scrapers and the texture in painting - the look and feel of the canvas. Using an impasto paint, where it is laid on the surface thickly, can serve to make the light reflect in a particular way, or add an expressiveness to the work. It is possible to juxtapose the thick paint with thinner paint, creating different surfaces, flatter and otherwise, in the same work.
I studied MA Painting at Wimbledon College of Arts, and graduated in 2017." - Kim Onslow
