Olivia Mansfield

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Olivia Mansfield’s small paintings pack a punch. Her intuitive process manifests energies drawn from the substratum and celestial alike. Take ‘Meet Me By the Dunes’. The contours of the landscape, earthy tones, hazy or solid application of watercolour, the feeling of looking simultaneously at the recesses of the future and the distant past – all this gives the work its mythic flavour. The blissful use of paint meets the sensuality of a landscape or the human figure in Mansfield’s work. In ‘Surya’ the circular canvas, with its scene of converging temporalities, is the setting for a nude both classical and iconographic, arising from its sublime surroundings. In ‘Focus on Deep Waters’, the quality of paint conveys the quality of water in its motion through blurred and focused perspectives; in ‘Your Plinth Is On Fire’ it is amorphous and undulating. In ‘Tread Lightly’ we begin to understand the intuitive process in this case as one which taps into form rhythmically, through the use of colour and shape. Vivid, vital: though small in scale, these are by no means diminutive visions. The richness, the eternal about these paintings is provoked by a submersion in the rhythm of decay and renewal.