Ingrid Fawcett

 

Art is literacy of the heart   Elliot Eisner

 

Painting slows me down. Like so many of us, my life is busy and sometimes hectic. My painting time is a meditative and joyful space in a busy and complicated world. When I paint, I flow between the conscious and the unconscious. Through the process of losing myself, I am able to find my painting. Sometimes my brushstrokes are intentional and focused: there is me, my tools, and the canvas. At other times, I enter a meditative flow, and there is no separation: I am the painting. The painting is me. Each painting has its own story, and as I take the time to get to know it, to feel its heart, the images call out to me, the painting speaks, and a poem unfolds.

 

I paint only images and subjects that excite me. There is an obsession in my work to find an energized moment, magnify it larger than life in both size and colour and capture that energy so that it invites us deep into its heart. When I was a child, I would stand at our hallway mirror pushing my palm against its glass, hoping, like Alice in Through the Looking Glass, I could enter an alternate world. I have found that world in my paintings. When I look into Little Red Lantern, I am enveloped into the life within the lantern, or I jump feet first onto the noisy Fisgard street-life in Lantern I. My work vibrates with bold colour and strong brush strokes. People often claim that I must be a very happy person. Generally, I am, and I invite you to share that energy, one painting at a time.

 

Painting is silent poetry, poetry is painting that speaks.  Simonides (500 BC)