SHONA ELRICK
ARTIST'S STATEMENT
Growing up in rural Aberdeenshire gifted me with a profound emotional connection to Landscape. I create unique landscape paintings, which captures feelings, colours and patterns experienced whilst walking within a landscape. Painted newsprint collage (a by-product of cleaning my brushes), is the basis of all my painting, from the initial studies to underpinning larger works on canvas. There is so much I love about this process, be it the expressive dynamic between painterly marks and ‘shadow’ grids found within the newsprint, or a surprise mark or colour. On closer inspection, the viewer can find arbitrary words and phrases; I find poetry in these as well as synchronicity either in regard to the place or some aspect to my life at the point of creation. My artwork has always been a balance of conveying a sense of awe, joy or curiosity about an experience in a landscape and that of play, relationships in colour, pattern and mark-making.
I am inspired by places familiar to me, whether that is my family home in Aberdeenshire, gifting beautiful skies over worked farmland or it’s untouched beaches and cliffs, or places I regularly walk in London, including Hampstead Heath or Scrubs Common. I exhibit widely in London, including regular exhibitions with the Riverside Artists Group.