Shona Elrick

SHONA ELRICK - BIO

Shona Elrick grew up in the open rolling farmland of Aberdeenshire, Scotland, where she would spend every available moment outdoors playing, helping out and exploring the local countryside. It is was in this setting that nurtured a deep-rooted and passionate bond to landscape, and therein began expressing her feelings of wonder and awe through paint and pastels.

She studied Fine Art - Painting at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen 1982-1986. During her studies her work was selected to be exhibited at The Scottish Royal Academy and Aberdeen Art Gallery. 

Significant influences at this time were to be the work of  Henri Matisse and Richard Diebenkorn: Matisse, for both his joyful play of vidid colour as well as his “radical flattening” of imagery on the canvas, and Richard Diebenkorn for his painterly mark-making qualities. These aspects and fascinations still endure in Shona Elrick’s work. 

Within a year of graduating she moved to London - a temporary move that finds her still there! Finding herself at a bit of a creative loss, she embarked upon a part time degree in Ceramics at Middlesex University. To Shona’s surprise, working with clay allowed her to explore the qualities of the traditionally 2D mediums of collage and mark-making; this provided the breakthrough in her painting which she has continued with to this day.

Shona Elrick has exhibited mainly in London: including a joint exhibition with Ceramist Sue Paraskeva at the Hiefer Gallery and a wide range of galleries, opens and Art Fairs. She has been an active member of the ArtWest Art Trail since 2009 and latterly she has exhibited with The Riverside Artists Group, again based in West London.

Shona’s continues to live and work in London, although also spends time at her family cottage in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. She also works part-time as an Art Psychotherapist.

SHONA ELRICK - Artist’s Statement

Growing up on a small farm in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, gifted me with a profound emotional connection to landscape: as a small child I would imagine how my ancestors would have walked the same tracks as me, or be moved in the presence of ancient standing stones. But I was also fasciated by the play of colours and patterns , as well as the ever changing drama of the big open skies and all the elements she threw at me. 

Therefore in my painting, not only do I wish to communicate my intense emotional responses to being in a landscape: be it a sense of awe, wonder or exhilaration - I simultaneously ‘play’ with aspects of colour and pattern which I find unique to that particular landscape.

My artwork is also concerned with how mark-making and colour can express an experience or moment in a landscape: I employ a multi-media layered approach using mainly oil paint, collage ,pastel, charcoal and pencil. Collage plays a significant role in the feeling and composition of my work: I use oil on newsprint collage - a by-product of my process of cleaning brushes.  I started incorporating the newsprint collage for the spontaneous quality of mark as well as articulating specific planes and textures within the image. 

My process includes layering, re-working and revising the surface - as in the tradition of the Abstract Expressionists - I am concerned with being authentic to the painting ‘as object’: in simplest terms, paint on a flat surface. On closer inspection the viewer will see arbitrary words or images hidden within the added newsprint collage. For me, these words and images not only bring about an element of synchronicity and poetry, they sometimes reflect the political events of our times - however only I would know where an image of ex-Prime Minister, Theresa May, is hidden in the ‘rocks’ within one of my Cornish seascapes!

In recent years I have concentrated on creating ‘Series’ of works, these being predominantly my ‘Hampstead Heath Series’, inspired from weekly dog walks on Hampstead Heath in London and my ‘North Sea Series’, created from visiting my familiar coastline on the Moray Firth in North East Scotland. New in the pipeline is a series of ‘postcards’ mapping the changing landscape of the River Thames from the estuary to the river’s source.