Nicola Gower Wallis
A Window Illuminated
I have never considered myself a student of realism. I've never quite reached the pinnacle of drawing a really good horse, or managed to draw a convincingly straight line. And perhaps it was then, in commiserating with a wonky looking cat, that my attachment to medieval art really began.
It's only been recently, so preoccupied with attempting to express my own stories within a single frame, that I have truly come to appreciate the forms and techniques behind those ancient paintings and tapestries. How succinctly they express a narrative, so stylishly removed from the constraints of the true and factual.
Spend enough time in any place and the landscape itself begins to form an odd little patchwork of memory and myth: currawongs drunk on spoiled apples at Koonya, the vile tyranny of a neighbour's marauding chicken, the Dunalley Fish Market on a Saturday afternoon, the madness of the Bream Creek show.
These works are an embrace of the wonky, the slight wrongness that comes from a story being retold too many times, the fuzziness of shapes seen at dusk in the wintertime, all washed out by the window of a house glowing brightly.
Thanks! Nicola