JAYNE SIMPSON

This series of paintings is the antidote to earlier work that was a heavy contemplation, inspired by memory, experiences of loss, personal history and trying to recreate a sense of remembering in a non-nostalgic way.
These new paintings are paintings I promised myself I would make 10 years ago at the end of my MA. Individually the work speaks of escapism, fantasy, colour and are subconsciously rendered through rituals of applying richly coloured paint, texture, motifs and drawing. This feels like an opportunity to play after the labour of previous endeavours, that is not to say there is no pain in these works, but it is not heavy and raw but full of the richness, of acceptance, hope and optimism.
My practice takes on all the critical influences of looking and contextualising and allows an outpouring of this knowledge to come through in the paintings of the fantastical, spaces, landscapes and places to escape to. Instant and unpretentious layering of delights and colour and shapes that invite happiness, I convey considered colour relationships and tensions of adventure and play. From dark tenebrism and a tension for light and shade of earlier paintings, I’m now making paintings as innocently as consciously as I can, while allowing the unconsciously revealing my inner most thought and feelings.
The paintings seem innocent but are the result of desperate fantasies in needing to accept what has gone. It is work that needed to be made after personal experiences of loss and bereavement. The product or the activity could be considered the medicine to those experiences, the antidote.