Tropical Glints, 2025

Henrietta  

I paint abstracts in oil on canvas, based on 'things seen': formerly still life, now mostly landscape, in which I aim to evoke time and place, using colour and light. I paint in thin layers, laying paint over paint to exploit its transparency, a technique of which Turner and Titian were both masters.

Ponds have recently become my focus. The sheer abundance of life has ignited an enthusiasm for mark making and greater experiment. I find myself using collage, painting up pieces of Japanese paper in a myriad of colours and adding them into my work as abstract shapes or more recognisable butterflies or fish.

My formative influences included Georgio Morandi, Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still. Morandi is remembered for pointing out that "There is nothing more abstract than the visible world". I in my own way set out to make abstract compositions out of things I have seen, and been moved by: "A world observed and translated – a world created from the natural and the man-made 'still life': a still life both drawn and felt, as one would admire and caress a well-loved jug, or wonder at the light on the water of the Thames on a calm spring morning".