Taw River Valley, Dartmoor Painting

OLGA BRERETON I am a British artist from Devon. I always felt a great desire to create and currently work from my countryside studio near Dartmoor. I not only paint and draw, but I create and plant gardens and work with textiles. My paintings explore my fascination with the connection between light, colour and movement - hence my horticultural background. It gives you a glimpse of the world through my eyes. My art is inspired by my passion for flora and the natural world and the ever-changing landscape of the Moors and the Atlantic Coast. I am trying to infuse my work with light and air, bring it to live. So you can walk between the layers of brushstrokes in the landscapes and wriggle your hands the stems of my botanical paintings and drawings, with their sinuous yet hesitant and careful winding lines. Despite their meandering quality I am inviting you to recognise my plants and their individual structures. The 'structure within anarchy' as I describe it, and the free handling of ink and paint coming together to re-create a cohesive whole with my eye-imagination-paint brush-surface process. As a child I use to play with my grandfather's gold chain, lowering it onto the tabletop to create infinite configurations. It seems that there my fascination with line began. The ability of line to mean something has fascinated us for millennia, and its potential to create an idea of space on a flat surface has been central to art since it began. My paintings and drawings are an equal marriage between the flat abstract quality of the marks, and the sense of space and subject that they depict. One can flit freely between enjoying the formal design of the work to the flowers and landscapes they describe. My work goes further still. Not only can one enjoy the slippage between abstract and figurative, but it also feels as though one can slip between the marks themselves. I make use of the white ground, be it paper or canvas, to shine through thin layers paint and line drawings, to create a light airiness to my work. It is possible to imagine the marks sliding off their support, like the gold chain off the table, and to be able to walk between the lines. As a passionate gardener, I don't set out to paint specific plants, but finds them within herself, allowing them to emerge organically with the piece itself dictating its own outcome.