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Mendip Painting Centre
Ros Cuthbert
David Cuthbert
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Ros
Cuthbert – Personal Statement
I
have been a practising artist since leaving the Royal College of Art in
1977. In that time, my work has been through various phases of
development. I work in series, spending anything from one to ten years on
a given theme.
During
the eighties, after winning a portrait prize in the National Gallery’s
annual open exhibition, I became mainly concerned with portrait and figure
painting, and worked in oils. Throughout my career I have made portraits
to commission from time to time. At that time I was looking in particular
at the work of artists such as Stanley Spencer, Degas and Velasquez. In
1990 I painted a self-portrait that borrowed ideas from Goya’s Portrait
of the Duchess of Alba. The late eighties also saw a gradual return to,
and development of, my interest in still life and landscape painting.
During
the nineties I began to make paintings in gouache on a Chinese ink ground
(a technique I discovered while working in mixed media), and produced a
long series of still lives in which invention and memory played as large a
part as observation. These became progressively more detailed. I had
learned the craft of wood engraving from the painter/engraver Blair Hughes
Stanton while studying Painting at the Central School of Art in London in
the 70’s. In 1993 I founded the Yellow Fox Press and produced
several books of poetry illustrated with my wood engravings and woodcuts.
My paintings at that time reflected the clarity and attention to detail of
the wood engravings.
In
2000 I joined a group of artists on a trek in the Australian Outback. As a
still life painter it was hard to cope with the vast spaces of the
Australian desert. I drew on older resources, returning to some of the
methods I had explored earlier, when in the eighties and early nineties, I
had made paintings inspired by the Tuscan landscape, and North Wales. I
also discovered the work of the Australian artist Fred Williams. My
Australian landscapes bring together a love of observation and a need to
be more freely expressive with the paint. I began to mix sand and other
things with the paint in an attempt to find a means of conveying my sense
of the toughness and fragility of this landscape.
My
sense of awe at finding myself in the ancient interior of the Red
Continent was something I was lucky enough to repeat, on the other side of
the world, deep in the Amazon, in February 2004. The ancient and silent
spaces of the flooded forest took hold of my imagination. In the following
two years I developed a series of spacious and elemental watercolour
paintings inspired by both the vast empty spaces of the Amazon River, and
the enclosing jungle.
Currently,
I am working on a new series of landscape paintings, this time inspired by
a hill near my home in North Somerset. It is a hill over which I have
walked countless times. I am at present working from aerial photographs,
some of which I have taken myself. My paintings are exploring the
transformation of volume to pattern that is our experience of landscape
from the air. In this, I am exploring connections with my subject matter
that go beyond realism. However, the scrutiny of ‘things as they appear
to be’ is still an artistic necessity, feeding my imagination and my
work.
Ros
Cuthbert / March 2007
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