Where does abstract painting come from? Part 1

Ella Clocksin (2016) Landscript 4, mixed media on paper

I'm showing four Landscript paintings in the Stories/Narrative exhibition at The Rookley Manor Studio, Isle of Wight, 10-11 December 2016. These paintings don't illustrate a story. But they do suggest that we cannot not make meaning from experience, even when that meaning is  improvised, or difficult to pin down. That process, of making meaning, is the underlying narrative here.

The Landscript series took shape in my mind while out running in ancient woodland near home. Unreadable notation marks of lichen, like primitive script, on tree trunks, leafy screens, the slow rain of falling leaves, and the blinding effect of alternating bright light and deep shade, all appear in abstract form. 

The intersection of external landscape with my interior landscape generates the abstract visual language of the paintings. Like abstract, visual haiku, the abbreviated painted forms and marks represent the inner quickening of experience in response to the visual. They evolve from seeing but correspond to the moment of perception, without a narrative arc.

This series continues my long-standing exploration of the insufficiency of literal description, or depiction, for some categories of experience. The poetic moment, beauty, love, grief, and the traumatic, all resist precise articulation, while provoking repeated attempts to nail a definitive form.