Georgina Elliott
Artists Statement
‘She tunes the painting to the memory which emerges, utilising composition, colour, and tonal value to emphasise the narrative of place she didn’t know she was remembering.’
Georgia Elliott’s instinctive landscape paintings are drawn from pools of implicit memory: the unconscious recollections we have that often unknowingly inform our routines, actions, and decisions.
When Georgia beings to intuitively pour paint onto canvas, the artist has no concept of the landscape she is creating. Rather, she is revelling in the release of automatic painting: creating from a place of freedom, throwing her whole body at the canvas. It is only until around 5 layers into the painting process when she begins to uncover land, water, and subtle signposts of a place once visited: a specific mountain in Iceland, the unmistakable bone-white cliffs of Seven Sisters. She gently and organically excavates this landscape, the memory blossoming like ink in water with each expressive stroke of the brush.
The painting process is free from any kind of reference material, although Georgia’s process does begin in the landscape with loose sketches transcribing rough shapes and textures. Instead of using these sketches as deliberate starting points, they act as visual notebooks; not to be used as reference material, rather to practice marks, to keep her eye in.
Georgia begins a series with several blank canvases. By painting multiple pieces at once, she restricts her illustrator’s instinct to home in on small marks, instead encouraging movement, transformation, dynamism. ‘With the beginning layers’ Georgia says, ‘you’re painting with emotion. The day, the weather, what occurred before, all of this will influence the colours, the movement, the marks, which will then determine the mood and atmosphere.’
Indeed, Georgia’s colours are chosen with a liberated desire. Complementary colours are a key driver of her work, used for their ability to excite and lead the eye, ensuring the viewer travels through the painted landscape to a point of light on a distant horizon.
The artist enjoys building a painting with impasto layers, only to sand, scrape, and wipe back through wet continents of paint, exposing the painting’s history. Georgia states, ‘the application and the removal of paint are both equally important.’ These nicks and furrows on the painting’s surface both serve to narrow and slow the viewer’s focus, as well as reveal the boiling, fizzing energy of the painting’s underbelly- the boldness of the initial marks.
Once Georgia can see a landscape evolving, she engages her analytical mind. She tunes the painting to the memory which emerges, utilising composition, colour, and tonal value to emphasise the narrative of place she didn’t know she was remembering.
For more information: https://www.georgiaelliottartist.com