SUSIE MONNINGTON
evocative abstract paintings
EVOCATIVE ABSTRACT PAINTINGS
Inspired by Outer Hebridean beach wanderings
I never know what my paintings will look like. They emerge from an intense and focused practice, balanced with trying to be open to surprises, alert and ultimately inviting in a painterly playfulness: A found bottle top from the beach used to make marks suggesting bubbles in the sand.
Seaweed washed up on sand, deposited in lines resembling manuscript staves with dried kelp spore sacs, scattered like crotchets and quavers, pushed and pulled backwards and forwards with the tide’s ebb and flow.Shape-shifting sands blown across the shore by relentless winds. A never-ending dance along the shore.Time marked out on rocks. Sometimes sanded and polished shiny smooth, sometimes geometrically precise with delicate traceries and occasional angry abstract gashes, scratched and gouged out like war wounds.
A reminder of the sea’s power. A sense of otherness, a feeling of being neither here nor there, a detached space in-between, that the Celts call A Thin Place - where heaven and earth collide.