Matilda Wainwright
MFA Painting
Paint allows me to play with colour and light in plastic, tangible form, it has a miraculous ability to conjure a new entity containing space, sensuality, intellect and emotion. The sound of the pigment when ground, the quickening of one colour when laid over another, the infinite potential of paint as a bridge between the physical and the metaphysical, the haptic and the cerebral.
I think a lot about the macro and micro nature of seeing, how the vast and the infinitesimally minute can look the same, the universality of things. A colour or form from the rural landscape I live in or from another painting I’ve been looking at can be a point of departure but I want to make a painting not a representation of something else.
I layer pools of pigment and collocations of detail in a “to and fro”, searching for harmony of line and field, using colour to organise the space and mark to imbue the painting with character.
I try to hold the territory between intention and intuition, too much certainty deadens, too much chaos becomes unsatisfying. I want the paint to materialise the integrity of contradiction and complexity but simultaneously the synthesised beauty of simplicity.
