Lido swimming fantasy Print

Arabella Yapp is a Contemporary artist from South London and studied fine art at Goldsmiths and Middlesex Universities. Her work is autobiographical, she finds inspiration in her immediate environment, life events and her friends and family. She lives and works in a highly diverse, inner city setting within a mixed English/Jamaican family and represents this inclusive life experience in her work. Alongside painting she has worked for decades with disenfranchised communities including refugees, young offenders, people with special educational needs and disadvantaged children as a teacher, drug counsellor and community outreach worker and is deeply committed to promoting inclusivity and equality. Arabella invites the observer into her personal spaces. Identifying and interrogating the environments, places, and individuals within her internal world. She frequently populates her paintings with tiny portraits of loved ones to create imaginary worlds, using painting to focus deeply on people, places and activities that bring her comfort and joy, akin to a visual gratitude diary. Swimming and water are a major themes in her work symbolising safety and happiness. During an often traumatic childhood swimming was the only activity her warring parents both participated in, excelled at and shared with their seven children. Family swimming expeditions constitute most of her happy family memories. As an obsessionally ardent swimmer she shares this love of water with her own children who feature swimming and diving in many of her paintings. Water and the interplay of light within and upon water reminds us of our own deep alignment to our primordial origins and the possibilities of both independent self realisation and connection to others, our potential for growth and struggle between past experience and determination to not be shaped by our abuses and trauma. She paints with acrylics employing vibrant jewel- like colours, focussing on creating impact by juxtaposing saturated contrasting colours, to make them “sing” and vibrate against each other. Arabella travels widely and takes many photographs which she often selects fragments of to compose paintings. She loves bright light and scrutineses the impact of this on colour in her paintings.