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Catalogue: Ione Parkin & Felicity Keefe
PRIMA
MATERIA EXHIBITION - SIX CHAPEL ROW GALLERY, BATH, in 2004
Author Vivienne Light
To
see a selection of paintings by these two artists go to
www.ioneparkin.co.uk
and www.felicitykeefe.com
Extract:
Prima
Matica
Ione
Parkin and Felicity Keefe are two artists who in the best tradition of
English Romanticism are engaged with the subject of landscape. Both have
chosen to work with nature in its most primal and abstract state. Their
work is grounded in direct experience of being out in the landscape. In
Parkin's case this has been through extensive travel to extreme territories
such as glacial rivers, solidified magma terrain, bare limestone plateaux
and dense tropical jungles. Her paintings, ambiguous and variable in time
and scale, are purposefully un-rooted, elusive and illusory. In contrast,
Keefe has returned to family roots in Devon and to places once familiar.
The Devonscape is ancient terrain containing both dramatic and quiet forms
set within wide horizons. For Keefe, as for Paul Nash, particular places
have a strong emotive resonance. Her paintings are not just about one
special place but chart the history of the place as once experienced.
IONE
PARKIN
As a
painter, Ione Parkin's concern is with the essential elements of the
landscape, with its raw constituents and dynamic evolution. Tidal erosion
and storm deposits, feint trace marks of archaeology, sustaining energy of
earth, geological upheaval and erosion this is the stuff of Parkin's
landscapes. This diverse world which straddles the abstract and figurative
is one which Parkin explores in her micro macro cosmos paintings. Here
form, structure and movement confuse and confound scale and animate and
inanimate surfaces co-exist in self perpetuating equilibrium.
Dark Origin Oil & synthetic resin on canvas 130 x 110 cm, 2004
Parkin's
paintings are partly a visual mapping of this world: the peacock blue-green
iridescence of copper carbonate or the oxidised rich black browns of iron
pyrites; soft green grey lichen and parasitic growths; burnt sienna and
burnt umber caves and soils; speckled cerulean nebulae systems;
subterranean rocks and liquid water. All these, and more, are parts of a
universe from which she draws source and subject and which she then submits
to the process of painting. Her early paintings of Tenerife's volcanic
territory made direct colour reference to the place. Since then, any such
local reference has become absorbed into a personal language of colour.
During
the actual physical manipulation of oil paint, to which synthetic resin is
added, new-found forms emerge ‘freeze-framed in time and motion'. There is
a tactile, organic and geological texture to her work which is surprisingly
fine and fragile. She may initially glean, like her much loved John Ruskin
or Turner, details from notebook drawings of cliff faces, grasses, clouds
and so on, but these she leaves to one side when beginning to put paint on
canvas. Applying ground colour in oxides she then uses a turpentine cloth
to draw paint back into the surface. The surface is very fluid and loose at
this stage. Next, she uses a method of transference in which intricate
calligraphic and minute seismographic marks are printed onto the
base-ground. United in mass and number these individual marks visually
unite as one complexity, one fine skin film. When painted in a particular
vellum white, calmness descends over the composite surface and with it
comes a feeling of integral wholeness.
The
making of a painting is for Parkin ‘an important meeting with a moment in
time… making contact with the eternal [and] unrecorded'. She sees her role
as a form of monitoring rather than asserting will over a painting, of
tracking down, following the scent, capturing a vision. While a student at
Winchester College of Art (1985-88) she wrote a comparative study on Zen
philosophy and psycho-analytic theory. Although the depth of the topic
overawed her initial enthusiasm much survived to influence her methods and
approach to painting: the aesthetics of simple ink brush work, the sense
that less is more, the creation of depth in a 2D plane, the cyclical and
reiterative nature of life and the internalisation of thought processes
which lead to external expression.
Today
Parkin continues to explore the relationship between landscape in the
widest sense and her own inner world - a world not only of intellect but of
subjective emotions, memories, perceptions and experiences.
While
at Winchester, her tutors included Vanessa Jackson and William Crozier; two
painters primarily interested in form and colour. Jackson's own paintings
were hard edged, geometric and ornamental while those of Crozier emphasised
brush strokes and verged on Fauvist in his use of brilliant colours
unrelated to nature. However, Jackson taught Parkin much about the
technique of painting, of staying with a work, while Crozier, as a
landscape painter, gave credibility to her own passion of working with the
landscape. Although Parkin's paintings are totally abstract she still
cannot fully break from a conscious involvement with perspective and landscape
and continues to talk of ground and receding distance in relation to her
paintings.
Parkin
works in a physical, intuitive manner. Perhaps appropriately to a Celt of
Welsh extraction she works quickly and in a vigorous manner, although since
becoming a mother she says she has become more patient, more nurturing. Her
canvasses can measure up to 1m30 x 1m60. These are placed flat, a few
inches off the floor; a positioning which echoes that used by the abstract
expressionist, Jackson Pollock. The placement of the canvas necessitates
her working in aerial mode; working on top and leaning and reaching across
the canvas. This results in considerable shifts in the weight and
application of paint which consequently contributes to differential surface
qualities and timbres. The physical choreography involved in making a work,
in its coming into being, is important. A trained musician, there is a
visible transfer of her skills as a violinist to her work. For both arts,
physical motion is an integral part of production. Each relies on an
ability to use just one part of the body independently – the hand, wrist,
elbow, shoulder or whole body.
The
resin which Parkin mixes with the paint neither alters or obfuscates
colour. Instead as with natural amber, it brings out an inherent glow and
translucency. Since working in the horizontal she has applied paint with
any tool except a brush. Thus pieces of solidified and crusted paint may be
applied with a palette knife or fine marks traced with a feather or frond
of a fern using a relief technique. Taking the brush out of the process has
contributed to paintings ‘looking as though they happen within themselves'.
With this has come a visible withdrawal of presence of self from the actual
painting. Fused pieces of pure invention, spirit and matter, she is happy
for her paintings to exist in their own right. Hinged between worlds of
reality and invention, friction and resonance, of thought and process, they
stand alone. The fact that Parkin has the confidence to let her paintings
speak for themselves is a testimony both to her skills and to her vision as
a painter.
FELICITY
KEEFE
Felicity
Keefe's painting is rooted in the landscape. She has taken the raw,
elemental colours of Devon's rich red soil, the brackish black of Dartmoor's
mires and the washed whiteness of its skies and created compositions that
are to do with the passage of time, resolution, return, and a sense of
belonging. Her paintings contain a suffusion of memories and events: her
early life on Devon's coast; generations of family who have lived and
worked in Devon; childhood excursions with grandparents to Cornwall and
Dartmoor; Devon's earth strong colours and a child's memory of the
environment being wrapped around her.
Transition (Passage) 2 Oil on canvas 120 x 116 cm, 2004
For
Keefe, there is a special time of day, a time when land quietens and grows
dark on the horizon but the sky holds on to a light which has unerring
clarity. The contrast between dark and light continues to grow as the day
shuts down. The weight of the land becomes increasingly heavy but a whitened
sky holds on until the very last moment and then suddenly it has gone. It
is the land which has won, this powerful dominating force which ultimately
exists independent of humankind.
For
Keefe the horizon, a line of division, is symbolic. Familiar and timeless
in people's lives it is yet nothing more than ‘a stretch of nothingness'.
However it ‘cannot be altered or disturbed, it is always there for as long
as we are here'. It is part of a whole sense of largeness, of vast
panoramas, which emphasise the small scale of the human race.
Keefe
did not set out to be a landscape painter. Having originally trained at
University of Brighton and then City of Bath College, it was not until five
years ago that she seriously decided to work with landscape as her subject.
Looking through some science books she came across some microscope pictures
and was fascinated by their similarity, in terms of marks, features, areas
of great activity and empty space, to landscape.
Her
first paintings were in the traditional landscape format. She became
interested ‘in the idea of something being there, then recessing back, then
a sense of space; a cross section of a landscape'. Today, she works mostly
in the square format and inspiration comes from a variety of sources,
including photographs taken by her father (a keen amateur artist), over
twenty years ago, to digital images taken by herself. Using computer
technology and the photocopier she zooms in on selected photographs until
the image has begun to deconstruct into a series of speckled, grainy and
broken marks. This process has started to make her look at landscape in a
different way, ‘removing it, yet making it more true'.
Using
oils, rich in pigment, she intensifies colour rather than staying true to
nature. Her use of colour is emotive, instinctive, elemental. She makes
much use of black a difficult colour to use without ‘blasting out' all
other colours around it. The black she uses is a mix of ultra marine and
burnt umber, of cool and warm tones. It is the underlying warmth of Devon
she seeks to communicate, rather than its coldness even on a stormy, grey
day. Always interested in skies, she has recently noted their particular
intense, luminous qualities, describing them as ‘light shot through with
liquid'. It is their brightness, even when blue is absent, that makes them
remarkable.
Keefe's
palette is restrictive, its minimalism echoes the starkness and bareness of
much of the landscape, such as Dartmoor, that she works with. Skilled in
drawing she will first try ideas out in small sketches, many of which are
painted in monotone acrylic. The size of canvas varies with subject, the
largest being over a metre square. Meticulous attention is given to the
fine weave surface before any paint is applied. It has to be smooth so that
it will not hinder an initial flooding of colour. Before beginning a
painting she knows what particular atmosphere, mood, emotion, time of day,
or other sensation she wishes to convey.
Having
marked the horizon, paint is then usually applied with a broad brush in
order to put a framework in place. Then the canvas is taken off the wall
and placed on the floor. Having worked in a controlled manner up to this
point she now subjects the canvas to much freer paint application. Paint is
flicked, spattered, dribbled down on to the canvas creating random textures
and markings. Water soluble oils allow her to do this, as they have a
fluidity and wetness not intrinsic to traditional oils. Once the paint is
dried then the canvas is returned to the wall for further painting.
Sometimes this procedure will be repeated several times. Keefe's approach
of working partly with intent, and partly with unplanned freedom mirrors
the landscape as she sees it. This is a landscape both structured and
chaotic. It is the confrontation and meeting between these opposing states
in nature and in her painting which produces dynamic energy and exciting
friction.
The
result of working over a period of time with a painting is the eventual
creation of a fine, thin, intricate surface with contrasting areas of
thicker paint. Highly atmospheric and emotive these are textural and
tactile works. In the Time and Tide paintings one can feel the tiny
coarse shell fragments and sand grains between bare toes. In paintings of Red
Earth one can visualise scored cliff trails and dotted scrub
vegetation. However, any such connection to the figurative is solely in the
mind of the viewer. Out of random marks something recognisable emerges
while something one thought to be recognisable recedes back into
randomness. It reminds one of looking through a camera and altering the
field of vision and magnification, shifting reality to abstraction, the
panoramic to the detailed. Most of Keefe's paintings are large, often dark,
but never forbidding. They are paintings grounded in a love of place and of
existence. A painter of great depth and feeling, the sincerity and vision
of her work permeates the very canvas she paints on.
12
August 2004
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