See Investable Artists
Looking at a garden, its blur of colour and form, is an experience emergent into abstraction: the loss of individual outlines of flowers and grassess in the cacophony of the whole. The garden is also the hybrid place of artifice and nature – as is abstract painting, in the work of Mary West.
Ilse d’hollander, whose paintings also hang delicately between abstraction and representation of natural phenomena, said that “it is painting itself that always remains fundamental”: like d’hollander, West is a painter’s painter. As their often temporalising titles evoke, West's paintings are rooted in moments of personal experience. An achievement spans the work: the effect of simultaneity in the layers of paint. This texture contributes a naturalism: the paint appears to have been applied in exactly the place it should be.