Having come late to art, I am driven by the need to do, make, live art. Now. Before it really is too late.
Painting and my studio practice are the core of my life. I was 40-something when art started to matter to me. Since then, my art practice has developed alongside a career, family, life. Now I have left academia and am working to establish a place in the contemporary art world through painting. www.lynnecameron.com
I feel that late stARTers have something different, and interesting, to offer the art world.
I’m getting ready to set off to Berlin for a year. I will be artist-in-residence and Fellow on a project about metaphor and film at the new Cinepoetics Centre at the Free University there.
It now seems to be time for my art practice and my academic research into metaphor to interact more than they have to date. I’ll be blogging here and on my website about what happens in the studio and as I explore and join the art scene in Berlin. And there will be metaphors.
Meanwhile, it’s packing up and preparing for the long drive to Berlin.
I’d love to receive any thoughts about painting in Berlin and possible contacts there!
It’s strange how an art project can just arrive. I’m in New Zealand with family, and spotted this book in a closing down sale in Nelson when we stopped for coffee. The gorgeous flowers on its front cover caught my eye, but when I looked closer it made my hackles rise with its assumptions and misleading descriptions: Simple, quick, easy, practical. My mother arranged flowers, and it never seemed to be any of those. I resisted learning back then, and it seems I’m still resisting.
Inspired by my niece’s photography experiments, I brainstormed ways that I could ‘explode’ the quick and easy arrangements:
and below you can see what happened to “Flowers and Fruit”. In my big sketchbook, the flowers were liberated from the kumquats, limes, lemons, and crockery. The cut-out inspired painting. The exploded flowers asked to be printed. The trial was re-done on a square canvas.
The title of the final piece comes from the book – “guaranteed to bring a ray of sunshine into your home”.
Before and during my exhibition ‘A Wonder World for Enid’ in the University of Leeds Clothworkers’ Hall, I am blogging about the paintings, where they came from and how they were made.
As an abstract expressionist painter, my art comes out of and responds to my emotions. The most intense emotions of the last few years were generated by my father’s dementia, and by my experiences as I watched it eat away at his mind, discussed decisions about his care, sat next to him on weekly visits to the care home.
The series of paintings that I call ‘A Wonder World for Enid’ emerged out of multiple, complicated emotions brought into the studio. Enid was frail old lady who lived across the corridor from my dad. It is still too hard, too raw, to make art directly relating to my father’s last illness. The paintings are for a re-imagined Enid, made safe through metonymy, appropriation and abstraction.
These paintings speak to the experience of watching my father fade away. Colour and form respond to the multiple emotions of that experience. The bright shapes underneath and among the grey suggest the rich lives of people with dementia that are gradually obliterated, but remain accessible longer than we think. They reflect moments of joy and connection that brightened my visits.
In brief: I moved to London, took an advanced painting course at Morley College (learnt lots, met good people), found a studio to paint in, then another one, did group and solo shows, sold work, applied to MA courses (have a place for 2015). Left London, travelled, moved back to Bucks.
Today the last cardboard boxes left the house.
Now I am a Bucks artist again, but so much has changed. The master bedroom is now my studio (very useful en-suite). I have left my job as professor of applied linguistics to work as a full-time artist. My painting has shifted as I have developed my style and my themes. I now paint ‘abstract expressionist landscapes of memory and forgetting’
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I have been blogging over on my website (lynnecameron.com) – there are so many social media opportunities, it’s hard to know where to place one’s energies. I’m back here because connections with other artists matter, and, living in the country, online becomes more important.
Exhibition in Leeds – “Falling into Place”
I am busy with the final preparations for my first solo show, which opens in Leeds on 2 August. The paintings are done, the publicity ongoing, necessary framing completed. Taking photos of the work has been interesting – I have used flourescent pink and orange as the core of the larger paintings; the photos on my iphone look great but I didn’t realise that these are almost impossible to print well.
I think we’ve cracked it for the catalogue and it points to the advantage of having an e-catalogue. I now need to master getting a QR code for visitors to scan…
BTW, if you are in or around Leeds on Friday 2 August, I would love to meet you at the Opening Reception!
