Vallis Print

100x100cm/ 39inch Oil on canvas - Stretched Unframed, No hanging hardware included. It can be hung unframed. Painted edges. Signed on the reverse edge of the canvas. From the limited Series - Origin Stories - A collection of 7 paintings exploring transformation. Each picture in the group is inspired by and connected to remembered stories from the artist's childhood. Vallis is a wooded area close to where Genevieve Leavold grew up, A river runs through it and it is the site of an old limestone quarry. The sense of nature reclaiming the man-made structures was a very early influence of her work and this painting is inspired by those forms. We are looking at brushstrokes building up, erasing and enhancing the underlying marks. Genevieve Leavold chose the subject of memory in this series because her own is so fragmented. Although the brushwork in these paintings is loose, the marks relate to this sense of fragmentation as the layers build. Beneath these fragments is a soft continuous movement, the core of the work and the first stroke painted on the canvas. This collection is the artist's first monochromatic series in oil paint. The artist chose to reduce the colour to a minimum to focus on the forms and movement. "I chose to work in a pared-back palette of black and warm white to focus on the forms. Although, while creating these works, I remembered that an early fascination with drawing came from making bark rubbings as a young child, I found the process of taking an image from the surface to me like magic. I want to share some of the magic that I feel when painting with the viewer and chose the monochromatic palette as a way to strip the work back to the raw and early love of mark-making. "