Ione Parkin and Felicity Keefe

To see a selection of paintings by these two artists go to

www.ioneparkin.co.uk and www.felicitykeefe.com

PRIMA MATERIA EXHIBITION - SIX CHAPEL ROW GALLERY, BATH

EXTRACT from a TEXT written by VIVIENNE LIGHT, 2004

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.

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.

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.