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Art of England - Issue 80, April 2011.
Sonia Stanyard and Amy Albright
By Martin Goold
Artwave West in Dorset is staging a major exhibition of new paintings by Sonia Stanyard and Amy Albright this spring. The combination of works by these two established gallery artists produces an ambiance that is hauntingly enigmatic, contemplative and gently stirring.
This eagerly awaited exhibition brings together Albright’s luminous paintings, full of freedom and floating weightlessness, with the beguiling and suggestive atmosphere of Stanyard’s highly personal, ethereal landscapes.
Albright has brought into her recent work a new lighter mood influenced by a summer spent in Greece and the colour and sensation of diving in the Aegean Sea. This is her second two person show at Artwave West and she has exhibited regularly at the gallery since its inauguration. Her growing reputation has meant increased demand for her work and the gallery is pleased to present this cohesive group of new paintings. Stanyard’s latest work, produced over the last year alongside her new role as a mother, reveals a new-found confidence to bring previously discrete elements together and a revived enthusiasm for the freedom of paint; this is invigorating her work and giving it a greater resonance and depth. She has already enjoyed high profile exhibiting in the UK and US but this exhibition features a substantial body of her most recent and previously unseen paintings.
Subtle and delicate shifts of colour, calm expanses of reflected light or deeply glowing twilight atmospheres, characterise Stanyard’s moving and quietly contemplative landscape paintings. Reference points in the landscape, a tree, a bridge, a window, are caught between materialising and dissolving, and precise detail and definition melt away into diffusion. These veiled visions that float as if in a dream might be seen as melancholic, but in this stillness a profoundly poetic, optimistic connection with both the power and the fragility of the natural world is made.
Far more than specific identifiable places, these softly evocative landscapes emerge out of a composite of Stanyard’s experiences. Violet Lodge for example refers to her travels in 2007 through vast and deserted American landscapes, finding abandoned semi-derelict cabins in the woods that inspired a variety of ambiguous interpretations: forlorn, secret, magical. The weathered peeling surfaces of these rudimentary structures opened up numerous painterly possibilities. Stanyard has worked from this subject several times but this latest version is full of a new spirit of discovery, as if familiarity with the motif has allowed her to enrich and revitalise the painting process. In Colony the misted, mountainous space is accented by a lush, almost Amazonian, section in the lower right of the painting; Stanyard was reading Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness at the time and the title of the painting references this trajectory of influence. A more constant motivating force throughout her work comes from the sublime qualities in Russian and Scandinavian art and the Romanticism of Caspar David Freidrich, as well as from the expressive power of abstraction, Mark Rothko in particular.
These examples typify an approach that deliberately avoids location sketches or photographs in favour of written notes that capture the emotive responses to places, and where the ensuing activity of painting has a life of its own. In the studio she floods the surface with translucent fluid paint, tilting the canvas to make coloured diffusions, carefully controlling the unfolding activity, and delicately accentuating suggestions. The original subject remains important but by the time the work is completed and titled it is merely a delicate thread connecting to a new lyricism that has emerged through the liberty of the painting itself.
Albright has developed a visual language that alludes to the interconnecting natural forms and patterns that surround us. Her paintings communicate an intimate view of the intangible and ambiguous in nature. Numerous sources are explored and referenced in her work: meteorological, astronomical, satellite and microscopic imagery, as well as her own investigative photographs. But it is the underwater, and more particularly the sense of being underwater, that provides the most heightened enticement to Albright‘s elemental vision.
In paintings of great richness and sensitivity she allows glimpses into a world that is not immediately apparent to the naked eye. But Free Flow and The Grace of the Shallows for example, paintings that seem almost abstract and minimal, only start to reveal their secrets when we are prepared to give more than a cursory glance. With careful looking minute fragments and traces that seem mysteriously familiar emerge out of deep, luminous, translucent surfaces of colour; fragile aqueous shapes, beads of glowing light, and threads that float up out of turquoise or blue expanse hint at a primal universe locked deep in consciousness. All sense of scale is thrown into question; everything becomes blurred in an intimate unconstrained luminescence.
There is a refined purity of purpose about her painting process; works evolve by allowing and capturing elements of chance, and balancing this with an intuitive response to previous marks. Layering, pouring, imprinting, accentuating and tuning takes place in the studio, methods that seem as organic as the subject itself, as if the work is imitating nature's ephemeral flux.
This is the first exhibition devoted entirely to the fascinating interaction between these two artists; the connection, as well as the divergence of ideas, allows a unique reading of their works. Placed together the paintings cast an atmospheric, meditative and sensual tone within the clear uncluttered space of Artwave West. This exhibition promises to thrill even those already familiar with these artists.
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