Heather Duncan

New Work

18th September – 23rd October, 2010

Contact us for full catalogue

 

Heather Duncan, Blue woods

 
 

Press Release
 

I take my inspirations from my everyday life, from landscape, from music, from memories. Each painting is drawn from a stream of consciousness, often starting in landscape but becoming more abstract and expressive. I start by covering a white canvas with washes of colour, then begin to work more intuitively. Intuition then drives the direction of the painting; experiences and observations become filtered and developed upon the picture plane.
 
I have a deep and strong connection with the expansive open moorlands of the north of England where I spent my childhood. The openness into which I escaped both physically and emotionally is reflected in my work. I approach each piece in an open and instinctive way, balancing spontaneity with considered choices of colour, gesture and mark-making.
Each piece invites free interpretation from the viewer, but is a highly personal and emotive response to experiences that I have had. Whilst my paintings are mainly inspired by landscape, they are like looking at the pages of a diary in terms of what they represent to me.
As a child, we had only two small books on paintings, yet I was hooked. A defining moment was the first time I went into the National Gallery as a teenager and saw some of the paintings from these books: they suddenly became real and vital.
 
I have a deep connection with wide and exposed landscapes. I like the varied climatic qualities of a temperate landscape, the atmosphere that it creates within us and of itself. I find a calm beauty in the grey mist of an October morning, excitement in the gunmetal sky of an approaching summer storm. I love the sharpness of the wind as it assaults your face, or the gentleness of a salt-laden sea breeze. To represent this, I have moved away from the straightforwardly representational and am more concerned with abstracting the essence of a place.
 
I paint what I know and remember about experiences in a landscape. I may mentally revisit it a place years after my actual visit, when the strongest memories become the ones that define the painting and its mood.

Address

Tarpey Gallery
77 High Street
Castle Donington
De74 2pq

Opening Times

Thursday – Sunday
10am – 5pm

Phone

Luke Tarpey – 07772404293

0

Your Cart