Holding On to Blues

Rebecca Payne

In Rebecca Payne’s works disparate elements make for hesitant conglomerations. Appearances seem to be parting, to show more appearances: the liminality the artist describes. The immediate naivety of the scenes belies a sophisticated handling of perspective, amplifying on further looking. The dynamism of the angles, the submerged drama, the theatrical colour: the heightened naturalism of these scenes is slightly off-kilter, tilting into the surreal, with an intimation of the sublime. 

The artist describes these works as part visual diary, part visual poetry. A focus is deployed that engages the periphery; the fantastical is present in these works, tacitly or more explicitly. See the attenuated and gestural application of paint, or the thick swathes of marker in an almost painterly application of pen. They can be reminiscent of Chagall – though the application is different and the fantasy less overt in content and composition, where the centripetal force of perspective still holds. The landscape is a place of creation and individuation – think of Cézanne’s mutating mountain, or Van Gogh’s transmogrifications, or Turner’s dawn light ablaze. Dora Carrington’s scene of the Lake District hanging in Tate Britain accentuates in form the area of interest to the painter – a sense present here, too, of the artist’s curiosity shaping the landscape.