- Venue
- Oneonesix Gallery Tenterden. June- August 2014
- Location
- South East England
With an unrelenting compulsion for drawing it is apparent that Felicity Truscott has enjoyed creating her new collection of deep monochromatic abstract landscapes. Their dark colourless surfaces emphasise the artist’s implemented techniques and materials – adding and subtracting layers and paths of charcoal black and gesso white – however, the brilliant reflective whites prevent these works from becoming definably sorrowful in their absorbing blackness. The strong forms and shapes created are reproductions of physically experienced places, responding both to the visual scenery and to its elemental properties. Truscott employs the chalk, graphite, charcoal and wood ash found on the coast and hills of her treks reflecting and connecting her work with its source in a direct and tangible manner.
Truscott’s drawings embody the spirit of Richard Long’s land art of the late 1960s & 1970s – his purposeful journeys exist in flattened grass and overturned stones as an expression of their own occurrence – but resolute to drawing Truscott confines her journeys to the compositional recordings that define her topographical odysseys. Traces of the artist’s early travels are visible in the textured layers that become reworked and covered, they are remembered in ghostly suggestions – paths (methods) once employed become superseded by new directions and new visualizations. Becoming that scenic route entertained for pure bucolic pleasure, refined to optimise sensory enjoyment rather than speed or convenience.
The exhibition’s opening image Open Curve Long (2013) is a sketchy charcoal-on-paper landscape and is discernable as an actual location, but travelling through the length of OneOneSix the pieces begin to trade recognition with ambiguity and simple forms are defined by an emphasized chiaroscuro of harsh blacks and the striking whites. Before reaching the reduced definite lines and flat surfaces of Line and Curve 1-6 (All 2014)Truscott ventures through a range of experiments and evolutions applying them as discoveries on the passage to interpreting her surrounding. The works combine to present a refined collective of mid-sized boards and canvases each providing their own landmarks, memories and fables which agglomerate into a narrative of the artist’s progressions and culminate as Line and Curve.
The show conforms to the ideals of abstraction; reveling in the development stages, progressive ideas and eventual realizations of Truscott’s encountered landscapes, cleverly broken down and redesigned into striking evocative forms.
