Your average day probably involves looking at an electronic screen. From work emails and texting, to social media and news stories, the eyes are always on a relentless quest for knowledge, communication, and entertainment. ‘Screen fatigue’ is a guarantee – where did caution go? Where’s the person who used to yell “Don’t sit too close to the TV or you’ll ruin your eyes!”? What’s needed is a palate cleanser, an amuse-bouche for the eyes and a sorbet for the soul.
Ella Squirrell’s playful and refreshing work is certainly up to the task. Creating a “theatre in oils”. her paintings slow down the urge to go to the next thing (and then to the next thing), instead capturing moments and imbuing them with story. In Squirrell’s own words, “the element of surprise and chance within painting excites me to capture not only what is seen in a moment, but also what is felt, recalled and understood”.
Squirrell is a multidisciplinary artist working with painting, film, photography, and performance. A Fine Art graduate from Falmouth University, her primary focus in painting has led her to develop a unique process of applying paint in soft and fluid motions, making colours waver and ooze across the canvas. Turning her attention to lovers, night-swimmers, summertime dozing and more, her cast of characters are rendered with both an intimate precision and looseness, all at the same time.
Figures are often cast in shadow or deep in thought. See a recent work Peach (2020), where a woman lined in mauve slumps into her palms as a foregrounded peach beams with colour. The viewer is moved to question how to fruitfully spend a day, or, as poet T.S Eliot wrote in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock – “Do I dare to eat a peach?”.
As a life-long swimmer, this fluidity of material and subject in Squirrell’s work is to be expected. Her swimming scenes particularly capture the almost spiritual meeting of humans with water, even in the most everyday scenes. In these work there’s a palpable joy in viewing the dawdling of limbs and awkward delight of day-trippers, as they thrash about in the bluest and brightest of waters. Reminiscent of the swim studies of British figurative painter Leon Kossoff, Squirrell similarly captures the energy of lidos – albeit with a certain smoothness and tranquillity all her own. Lose yourself in one of her paintings, and find your eyes readily refreshed to dive into a new day.
£1500