Congratulations to Kerry Johns, whose painting Oval Mirror, 2020, has been acquired by the Brisbane Girls Grammar School Collection, Queensland.
‘I loved the time of mandatory isolation last year, that first period of several months in 2020! Everyone stayed at home, nobody was out, nobody could visit. Nobody was the least interested in what I was doing. Freedom from distraction, from expectation, from notice and every day could be devoted to work.
Since I couldn’t go out to work in the landscape, I resolved to use the same subject and see how many different ways I could approach it,… What interested me most were the spaces between the objects seen at close quarters. I treated these negative spaces as positives which tended to equalise foreground and background. Following this principle naturally led me to an exploration of abstraction in nature. Treating every change of tone or colour as closely as possible to the seen phenomenon, there followed a build up of abstract marks which resolved themselves into knowable shapes. This was a liberating process. It allowed me to choose the most complex subjects knowing there would be a way through. ’ ~ Kerry Johns 2021.
Image left: Oval Mirror, 2020. Acrylic on Canvas, 70x80cm. Collection of Brisbane Girls Grammar School, Queensland.