Connotations
“This exhibition marks the end of a beginning”, says Pippa Blake of her upcoming show at Candida Stevens Gallery. The culmination of five years of exploring the immersive experience of walking in nature, this final installment of over twenty works range from small-scale studies to large diptychs influenced by recent trips to New Zealand and Morocco. With a particular focus on the way the landscape transforms at night, the paintings are suggestive of an in-between state; the moments before a day ends, the beginnings of a dream, the next stage of a journey unknown. They possess a haze that speaks of the fleetingness of life’s experiences and the sense that something intangible remains just beyond reach.
Blake treasures time spent with her daughter walking in the New Zealand bush, a landscape to which she feels a deep-rooted emotional connection. When travel was restricted during the coronavirus lockdown in 2020, this experience was distilled to the virtual experience of accompanying her daughter on video calls and receiving photographs, and sparked a line of artistic enquiry that she has pursued in the years since. Following her most recent visit, the intimacy of this shared experience is expressed in two small studies that show the artist following the silhouette of her daughter, beyond which the path and tree trunks are illuminated by torchlight but the wider view remains enveloped in darkness. In another, larger painting, yellow light glows through the trees and is reflected in a pool of water. The translucent outline of a figure, symbolic of the artist’s daughter, heads into the brightness and leaves the shadows of the forest and of the past behind.
The power of light and dark is endlessly fascinating to Blake, whose eye is drawn to the transience of dappled sunlight in a forest, reflections on the water, the shadows cast by moonlight. She believes this stems from her experience of sailing on the oceans, the constant movement over the water’s flat surface resulting in the most fleeting experiences of light and colour that she has sought to capture in paint ever since. Considering the bursts of saturated colour chosen in this latest body of work and her interest in capturing the more tropical scenery of North Africa, Blake muses on her past experiences of arriving on exotic islands by boat. One gets the sense that as she paints, memories jump out at her, vibrant for a moment before becoming blurred around the edges, resulting in works that are imbued with a sense of wistfulness and mystery. In Morocco it was the quiet moments in the evening that Blake felt compelled to photograph - floodlight palm trees and empty paths against the darkened sky - a contrast to the brightness and colour-saturated experience of the holiday sun. Hovering between optimism and solitude, they suggest an acceptance of the future tinged with wariness of the unknown.
Capturing something of the artist’s inner experience of life within her paintings is central to Blake’s practice but is, to a large extent, a subconscious act. Searching through hundreds of photographs, snapped hastily on her phone, the artist finds interesting compositions to extract as the starting point for each work. Experimenting with these digital images, she enjoys the ways in which a picture can be transformed by accentuating or suppressing colour and light, until they exude a certain atmosphere she feels compelled to translate in paint. Layers of workings on the canvas contribute movement and energy, broad brush strokes and blocks of colour brought alive by intuitive oil pastel ‘highlights’ on the surface. Describing her process as exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure, it is this journey of mark-making that proves so essential for Blake’s practice, whose atmospheric paintings evoke feelings and memories that extend far beyond the scenes she chooses to depict.
Essay by Isabella Joughin
