Leaving Painting

Leise is an artist who produced an installation titled 365 Days for the Turner Contemporary Gallery U.K . The work took two years to make and was made with 1460 individual paintings. Landscapes- Wilson’s sweeping watercolours are often large; her sheer cliffs, rolling fields and snow topped peaks are breathy and spacious, existing on a scale not typically associated with watercolour painting. This initial play with the physicality of the work is further explored through Wilson’s process - painting onto tissue paper that is then pasted in nuanced, translucent layers upon her large supports. This maintains a life and vibrance to the paint, Wilson states, but it also gives her time to meditate on her compositions, drawing on her experiences and recollections. Despite often referring to specific locations in the titles, these are works from memory not from life or secondary sources. Wilson visits and revisits a site over days, weeks, even months; not only is her experience of the landscape very direct, it is also patient. In the studio, her assortment of remembered visual moments, physical sensations, and associations instinctively inform the emergence of the work, the versatility of the tissue paper allowing for a sustained connection with the space as it emerges, buoyant with harmonious complexity. At times, Wilson’s obsession with light is elemental to the point of abstraction. 365 Days is a single work comprised of a painting the sky through a single window pane every day for a year for a period of two years. The resulting work is a painting installation that explores the unpredictable natural rhythms of light that influence us each day, physically and emotionally, while going so often unnoticed. Again Wilson is playful with formal concerns, imbuing minimal abstraction with very personal moments of experience. While the implication such human experience is a strong motivator for her work, human presence is conspicuously absent.There is an unearthly stillness and quiet, more silent than our own experience of the landscape could be; so quiet, she says, that one could hear the snow fall. In striving for this, Wilson develops spaces that are more lyrical than literal. These are traces of space; effortless and at first familiar, yet as their uncanny quiescence questions the expectations of our gaze, they begin to transcend the pictorial, shifting from image, to a more ambiguous imagining. A sublime imagining perhaps.