Constructing Spaces and Between Spaces are part of an ongoing exercise to interpret the images of my everyday experience from memory or photographs. Patterns of light, architectural elements, lines and surfaces structure the page to make up my visual vocabulary. They create invented perspectives – perhaps my own personal blueprints – to be viewed aesthetically or functionally, in two or three dimensions, in constant reconstruction. They are elements of a whole that find meaning in the recurrent attempt to engineer new grounds for inspiration, step by step.
Daphne Gamble
Daphne Gamble’s paintings are an act of painting. Every canvas is a new investigation of, and confrontation with, the nuances of color and matter, all in a language of rectangles and lines. She approaches printmaking and collage in the same way.
Her works do not deal with histories, other than the history of one work carried onto the next. She talks to me about urban architecture motivating the work, although only remotely. The works are in themselves architecture, and more precisely the architecture of simultaneity, in that one work moves directly into another. At the same time, one canvas with its relations between one part and another, between one line and another, can stand alone while remaining a part of a whole.
Per Kirkeby, writing about simultaneity, quotes Jorn, “Attention must be expanded to take in the whole, be stretched, not addressed, to a point in the whole.” This spring her studio is full of fresh starts and progressing paintings. Simultaneity has a vibrant presence. The eye will not be swept out. It will be pulled to another painting. The focal point is in the whole, with a guarantee that the same will happen in the exhibition environment.
Intuitively Daphne Gamble knows “a point is in the whole”, making her free to concentrate on the act of painting. Experience certainly makes intuition keener. She is confident to experiment. See the finite in juxtaposed rectangles with soft edges, built up layers, cancellations, additions of other layers. See the immensity in white dominating one canvas, a muted blue holding another. Here are earth tones under thin white washes. Acrylic washes cover other washes. The loss of one transparency is the foundation of another. Drawn charcoal lines mark new sooty edges. They underline the horizontal or the vertical of a canvas. “Edges are important,” she says. They may change.
In spite of all she knows about the medium of paint, she must forever be alert to chance, to the infinite nuances and autonomous turns colors will take. The same white from her palette is one tone here yet, a different tone there. She is thrilled by surprises. They are provoked, respected and used. On a newly primed canvas of neutral color linen a black rectangle is center left, the weighty ocher one-off center right. These will certainly become history in the painting. This is not to say they are tossed out or destroyed:, like the bonding stones on a wall, buried by the season’s grasses and leaves, they are still there.
This firmness in simultaneity is her quality.
Her works do not deal with histories, other than the history of one work carried onto the next. She talks to me about urban architecture motivating the work, although only remotely. The works are in themselves architecture, and more precisely the architecture of simultaneity, in that one work moves directly into another. At the same time, one canvas with its relations between one part and another, between one line and another, can stand alone while remaining a part of a whole.
Per Kirkeby, writing about simultaneity, quotes Jorn, “Attention must be expanded to take in the whole, be stretched, not addressed, to a point in the whole.” This spring her studio is full of fresh starts and progressing paintings. Simultaneity has a vibrant presence. The eye will not be swept out. It will be pulled to another painting. The focal point is in the whole, with a guarantee that the same will happen in the exhibition environment.
Intuitively Daphne Gamble knows “a point is in the whole”, making her free to concentrate on the act of painting. Experience certainly makes intuition keener. She is confident to experiment. See the finite in juxtaposed rectangles with soft edges, built up layers, cancellations, additions of other layers. See the immensity in white dominating one canvas, a muted blue holding another. Here are earth tones under thin white washes. Acrylic washes cover other washes. The loss of one transparency is the foundation of another. Drawn charcoal lines mark new sooty edges. They underline the horizontal or the vertical of a canvas. “Edges are important,” she says. They may change.
In spite of all she knows about the medium of paint, she must forever be alert to chance, to the infinite nuances and autonomous turns colors will take. The same white from her palette is one tone here yet, a different tone there. She is thrilled by surprises. They are provoked, respected and used. On a newly primed canvas of neutral color linen a black rectangle is center left, the weighty ocher one-off center right. These will certainly become history in the painting. This is not to say they are tossed out or destroyed:, like the bonding stones on a wall, buried by the season’s grasses and leaves, they are still there.
This firmness in simultaneity is her quality.
Kate van Houten
*Per Kirkeby, selected essays from BRAVURA van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven 1981.