(30.5×30.5cm) acrylic on cradle board .
This painting is available see my gallery
What inspires my paintings? I use the term inspired to describe where my paintings come from, but in truth that is an objective term for the mystery of the making of my art.
Let me give you an example. Take this painting above ‘Rain Over There’. Overall this painting can be seen as sending a message of hope! The rain clouds are a sign of hope!
Broadly speaking it’s inspired by the Australian light and colour – you can see the rain clouds in the distance. The title is an objective statement about what you can see in the painting, but my painting is much more than that. My art is an expression of my life and the painting process draws upon all my memories and experiences. This explains largely why no two artists paint the same way.
My intuitive painting process
Through my painting, I draw on my early childhood memories of my life in rural Australia, the language of the farmers and ‘bushies’ as they scan the horizon during a drought, and of course the current drought. The painting is not about any one of these things alone – rather it is an amalgam of my ‘internal landscape’.
Knowing this you might well ask, “then where did the image in ‘Rain Over There ‘ come from”? The answer to that is, ‘the landscape formed as I painted’. This is what I mean when I describe my paintings as intuitive landscapes.
If you had asked me at the beginning of the work- “what are you painting and where is it”. I couldn’t have exactly told you – although I knew it was going to be about the Australian country up north.
However, once finished I was able to geographically place this painting. I knew this was inspired by the country around Parachilna by the colour of the earth, the rocky ground, the leached salt soil and the fringe of trees in the background. So now when I look at the painting I’m transported to Parachilna country. I now have an emotional connection to that country, through the painting.
While paintings give us a ‘sneak peak’ into an artist’s life, they also trigger responses in the viewer who recalls part of their own life. That’s why no two viewers respond to an art piece in the same way.
The painting connects an artist and the viewer, they share an experience through the painting; an emotional response to an art piece is an internal recognition of that connection.
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This painting is available see my gallery
Rosemary Warmington
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