Abstract Landscapes:
'Fragile with Attitude'
Audio descriptions of the landscapes written by Louise Fryer and painted by Zoe Partington. The audio files are also available as downloads but please use headphones to listen to the audio - it sounds more fluid - these audio files were created by Zoe and Gavin alongside Louise Fryer who used her linguistic and AD skills to help write the descriptions.
Zoe adds her own input to some. Zoe then shared them with Gavin Griffiths from Power Audio Productions who created the sound files, having no access to the paintings. She asked Gavin to embed the AD and sounds into one audio file for each painting, to enable audiences to have a new perspective into the paintings, that don’t require sight.
Paper Mill
This image is created in acrylic & chalk paint on a 60cm square board - its frame a thin golden edge. From an abstract swirl of sandy colours, a river bank face emerges. It’s half-way up and runs across the image, rising a little to the right. Fine lines picked out in black define ridges and crevices, as though the river bank has been etched from exposure to the elements. Highlights in a bright chalky blue course like water down the front of the bank, suggesting this process is ongoing, while the rock that is ground away forms dense clouds both above the bank and below.
Azzure Essence
Uses oils and chalk on an unframed canvas, measuring 50cm square. It’s a brooding piece full of movement in shades of blue and purple turning green and brown where the colours interact. Just north-west of centre, a chalky white disc hangs like a moon suspended in a heart shaped patch of blue sky. Its right-hand side is smudged with a thumb-sized blotch - an orangey beige, the colour of raw plaster. More of this hue swirls in a bruise of clouds around the disc, turning green where it meets the blue. Below the point of the heart, just to the right of centre, the sweeping paint turns pink merging with purple-swirls of colour that extend to the right-hand edge. Lilac here, the purple darkens along the painting’s bottom edge, clumped like the tops of night-time trees. More of this deep purple is thrown up in a tracery of fine lines on the greenish-orange clouds like a sketch of distant buildings that reach up towards the moon.
Blue Mist in the Air
Acrylic paints, freely applied in swirls of greens and blues cover the entire surface of this canvas that measures approx 1 metre square. With a limed oak frame. The colours have the intensity of a peacock’s feathers, overpainted with chalky white moving down to a dark patch of cobalt blue in the lower right-hand corner, so that the lighter colours above appear to hover. Traces of textured brushwork whip up the surface, scratched with fine lines and dizzying circles. The effect is mesmeric. Zoe calls this image “Blue Mist in the Air” but it could equally be the surface of a pond dappled with lily-pads reflecting blue skies above.
Bubblegum
Painted in acrylic on a board 50cms square, this image is called Bubblegum. Bubble gum is a reference perhaps to the pinks that gaily streak across its surface in horizontal bands. These are not solid blocks of colour but smeared, creating different textures and surfaces. The image as a whole suggests a marshy landscape, reflecting pinks in a sky that marks a horizon, four fifths of the way up the board, above a dark blue band of sea. The thick central band is a sludgy green, with etched vertical marks denoting grasses at the edge of a bog which the water presumably floods at high tide. The October visit to Westonbirt Arboretum and the scent of candy floss from the maple inspired this bubble-gum canvas.
Whispering Storm
This image in mixed media – acrylic and chalk - is in landscape format. A thin metal frame. A channel, a river perhaps, crosses the canvas about a third of the way up. A narrow tributary flowing into it cuts through the near bank in the foreground towards the left. This bank is brown with the suggestion of undergrowth picked out in fine black lines with white chalky highlights, sketched in with lightness and apparent speed. White mist rises from the channel beyond, hovering just below a line of vertical blue and white strokes that depict a row of trees on the far bank. These trees grow increasingly indistinct towards the right where beyond the frame, the channel might meet the sea. The most arresting thing about this image is the sky – a yellowish shimmer with a rosy tinge hinting at bad weather to come. This yellow is part-blotted out as blue and white clouds gather, connecting with the trees below, in an ominous winter twilight.
Traces
Using acrylic and chalk paint on a canvas 50 cm square, and with a limed oak frame. This image takes me to the Alps or some mountainous landscape. Our perspective is high up above the top of a pine forest the trees dotting the slopes of a mountain peak, with sparse, spiky branches protruding from snow. The snow, whipped perhaps by an unseen wind, is turned purple under an abstract sky formed by clusters of cloud. These clouds are blue, turquoise, purple, even a bruised yellow in places – the colours mingling and merging as they surround a large clear patch of white sky at the top that curves from left of centre to the upper right-hand corner. Are the trees reaching for this sunlight or hunkering down at the threat of another dusting of snow?