Award winning, not-for-profit arts publication reflecting on mental wellbeing. Produced and curated by Alice Bradshaw, Vanessa Haley & Lenny Szrama, founded in 2018. Design by Ashleigh Armitage.
This just painted itself. The whirling came first. The dervishes came with the eyes. I just kept feeling emotions out of control. The blue, grounds the motion of the frantic demons……ORIGINAL is ready to hang with painted edges £550.
Artist statement Jain Larsen-Collinge. Artist – Oils & Watercolour.I love red. I have spent many years in hot, Latin countries, and I think this shines through in the bold colour and lively temperatures of my paintings. I have lived, and studied Art, all around the world. Life is never boring. Abstract works are geometric & expressionistic. Representational works are in watercolor.
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Mexico’s Day of the Dead was the inspiration. Throw in a little Rolling Stones & Munch’s Scream and there you have it. Life can be full of anguish. Sharing with others is a positive step. Movement is a way to help shift some of your inner demons. Heal yourself.ORIGINAL is ready to hang with 2″ painted edges. £1000.
Artist statement Jain Larsen-Collinge. Artist – Oils & Watercolour.I love red. I have spent many years in hot, Latin countries, and I think this shines through in the bold colour and lively temperatures of my paintings. I have lived, and studied Art, all around the world. Life is never boring. Abstract works are geometric & expressionistic. Representational works are in watercolor.
From a personal perspective, this last year has had a huge negative impact on my mental health. Fear, anxiety, loneliness. Coupled with peri-menopause and all that that entails. This piece reflects my emotions perfectly, the handprint represents the need to leave something tangible and solid before I completely disappear.
Artist statement For as long as I can remember I have been interested in details. Not the bigger picture but the finer intricacies, the colours and textures of life. I prefer to find beauty in the bark and lichen on a tree rather than the forest itself. The striations of a rock, the folds of fabric, the wrinkles of skin or the rust and the peeling paint on a weathered object. My work is mostly trying to capture this through colour and texture and the impact it has on our emotions. Living in Cornwall for many years, my work is inspired by the textures and colours of its rugged coastline and landscape. Its geology and history. Cornwall is steeped in magic and myth. I believe in its magic, the intrinsic wonder and beauty of the natural world. With all of its cycles of life and death and transformation. The energy it raises and transmutes, forever changing. To me abstract art can represent this perfectly. It is alchemy for the soul and often healing for the mind.
The current mediums I work with are acrylics, texture pastes and reactive paints. My work is emotionally driven, laying down a texture without an idea of what it will become. It is only when I start adding the paint, and dependent on my current mood, that it becomes a tangible thing. I started off painting as a form of therapy, a way to exorcise grief and emotions I struggled to voice and since have had work in art exhibitions physically and online. Recently I have been part of a collection of works in the book ‘Women Inspiring Quotes and Artistic Responses’ and one of the featured artists in ‘The Flux Review – Edition 3’.
When I fell in love with Art, I fell in love with portraiture. Regardless the time period, I found myself drawn to faces I did not know and wanted to try to understand. In my art I attempt to look at the experience of those I know well and capture the beauty they possess through all the uncertainty in their lives. Whether that uncertainty is parenthood, the pandemic, or the every day difficulties of living. After a decade long hiatus in my practice, I have come back to Art since becoming a mother. Although my themes have significantly changed in that time, I feel more confident in what I present to the world. Through all the stress of motherhood, I discovered a new focus that I did not possess before. An appreciation for working in the small moments, and embracing my mistakes. Although I feel most confident in oils, the constraints of motherhood and the influence of my own students has pushed me to work in new ways as I navigate the studio space with a three year old.
The image describes the experience of being locked-up and the resultant imaginings of a tiny trap door in the ceiling from which to evaporate, thus ending the nightmare of captivity.
In Catalonia, where I live, the quarantine lasted ten weeks, from the 16th of March to the 25th of May.Due to the impossibility of leaving the house to collect or buy new materials, I decided to work continuously on the same canvas.Through collage, assemblage and acrylic painting, the canvas became a scene in constant transformation. The result was an exploration of colorful and visual changes, an inner journey that allowed me to keep track of my mental state during the quarantine.
The action of painting brought me to reflect on the role of creativity in human health, and the possibility of using creative power as a tool to cope with uncertainty and to become more aware.Through the images painted weekly on top of each other between March and July (from the initial lockdown to ‘phase 3’), it is possible to read the layered story of this journey through awareness: by being creative we can rewrite our reality, and start to observe the world from a new point of view.
Duende refers to the word used by the poet Federico Garcia Lorca for defining the intrinsic power of the work of art: its capacity of reflecting the essence of the world. The canvas is perceived in my work as an external space where the fears, the frustrations and the emotions of that period have been “released” and became conscious. This is why my work is a ‘Duende of the Quarantine’, in which the essence of a ‘new world’ appears in all its power. On the canvas I worked on between March and July, today you can only see the final image of this long process. But each time I painted, I took a picture of the result. With these pictures I realized a video and a wall of polaroid-sized photos. They capture the entire process I went through in chronological sequence.
Artist statement I collect details.Spontaneous movements
Following authentic feelings.I listen to the poetry
Hidden in the daily silence
Permeating day by day
And filling everything.I tiptoe,Among the mutant shadows of dreams
At the edge of sleep,And I pause
Reflecting on their conversations.To feel and to imagine
Are the finest pearls inherited by humanity. My research consists of a creative exploration of the perceptive universe.
I focus on the acoustic dimension and its relationship with the visual.In particular, I pay attention on how we unconsciously process sounds and images, and on the invisible boundary between perception, interiorization and imagination.
In the last year I have been working mainly on the theme of mental health related to creativity, and the psychological challenges we faced during the pandemic. I think that approaching the topic of mental health from an artistic point of view is something important and rarely explored. As an artist and art therapist, I would like to have the opportunity to share my point of view in an interview and at the same time present an artwork that talks about the human being in the situation of seclusion and restriction experienced during the quarantine, with the hope that many people can identify with my images.
