MAKING OF THE WORK – ARTISTS STATEMENT

Painting for me is about how life feels rather than how it looks on the surface. It is a way of visually making sense of its multi-dimentionality – I need to engage in this visual language, and if it creates a dialogue with the viewer – the visual with the philosophical, responsive, emotional and even spiritual aspects of our life, and in the process creates a feeling of uplift and well-being or contemplation – I am more than happy.

The work is very much about process. The challenges and excitement of animating and bringing into form the stuff of paint – juicy, liquid colour moving slow to fast across the bare space of the canvas, and seeing where I can go with it, where it can take me. So the process is primarily abstract without any figurative narrative, although the presence of the surrounding landscape has a way of getting itself in there as fleeting images of light, a sense of movement of creature in vast open spaces, or the impression of moving forest or fell as seen from horseback at speed. Then contrastingly in improvisational workshops I respond in paint to the vital rhythms and movement of contemporary musicians and dancers – Jilly Jarman, jazz musician, Tim Rubidge and Miranda Tufnell dancer/choreographers. Again the process is essentially abstract but has a sense of movement through space with changing rhythms and sound qualities.

These art works are a result of the direct engagement with colour and paint; there has been no conscious intention to represent anything but Linda’s brushwork, as it fills out the canvas, always returns to the contours of deep heaving water.

Chris Dorsett