"Carissa" Painting

I am a contemporary British artist who has recently relocated back to the UK after spending the last 8 years in Australia. Graduating with a Fine Art Degree in 2008, I have since exhibited across the UK and Europe, Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra.

The subject matter of my work has always obsessively been the female portrait and each painting allows me to interrogate further my own intentions and ideals. What started as a desire to capture personal, unseen moments of womanhood through self –portraiture has now opened a wider dialogue about vulnerability and representations of women in mainstream media. My paintings of women aim to explore vulnerability and beauty whilst rejecting idealised, sexualised and media driven images of women.

The context of contemporary female portraiture has also allowed me to develop a distinctive visual language. My large-scale portraits are created using jars and jugs, pouring diluted oil paint on to a flat canvas in a series of complex and translucent layers, rarely using a paintbrush. In this way the process is highly spontaneous and unpredictable. Like a chess game, the paint makes a move and I respond, continually attempting to control chaos. This tension of the controlled and uncontrolled underpins every work and reflects a personal push and pull between representation and abstraction.

This visual language is equally as important as the subject matter of each piece. Whilst the creative process is certainly a vehicle for me to explore contemporary portraiture, the female portrait also acts as a vehicle for experimentation and exploration of mark-making techniques. With recent work I have been using gold leaf and areas of flat hand-painted pattern work to add further contrast with the bleeding, abstracted areas of poured paint.

Many of my works have also been inspired by children I have worked with overseas. After some time spent living and working in India my interest in magnifying and celebrating ‘unseen’ moments of beauty was re-activated and I started work on an ongoing series of paintings inspired by the children I met and the fleeting moments of un-stylised, authentic innocence and beauty that I found so far away from home.