This September I visited Portugal to embark on a months residency with PADA, mentored by Turps Banana editor and artist Phil King. The space away from my normal environment allowed me to make changes to my practice that before felt too far to grasp. I’ve written a reflection on what I encountered and the effects it had on my involvement with colour and my confidence in painting.

PADA is an artist-led, non-profit organisation founded by Tim Ralston and Diana Cerezino in 2018. Located in the town of Barreiro (a ferry ride from Lisbon) Tim and Diana renovated the remains of sparse derelict factory spaces to make studios. The area was previously ran by the company Companhia Uniao Fabril lead by a communist dictator, which exported products to Portuguese Colonies and this added to how I witnessed the city. Turps Banana began from a magazine predominantly about painters and since 2003 developed the correspondence course and several studios in London as a response to the inadequate quantity of painting tuition at universities in the UK. This was the first residency I’ve taken part in and I felt lucky to make work in the beautiful space Tim and Diana took on to build, as well as have painter Phil King share his passion with us.

 

 

Before my residency, I strongly identified with the immediacy of biro, making an image from basic and accessible materials and following an Outsider Art morale. With the encouragement from my fellow resident painters and our mentor Phil, I was reintroduced to painting and to access a boldness I had been hindering. New works crawled up my walls, from mono printing on paper to eventual painting on canvas. I owe a big thank you to my peers for this stretch in my practice.

Acquainting myself with Barreiro determined the second side of development. Marks scrawled on the city’s surface, by local people ranged from drawings of kinky creatures, to edited street signs pointing to “hope” and reminded me of my own need for immediacy making. A painting of a local factory, peered at us from a private courtyard wall, filled by individually fired tiles, classically Portuguese but echoing a watercolour from someone’s sketchbook. Through bars of another window barricade, breeze blocks are encrypted with white chalk. In height order the edge is parallel to the sloping path, evident this artwork was made by a single pair of hands. Both pieces divided by a grid, a process I use myself to deface an ideal surface, in order to puzzle together an evolving work. Colin Rhodes’ description of Western Primitivism comes to mind, from his book ‘Outsider Art, Spontaneous Alternatives,’ likening the people’s reconnaissance with their city barricades to “a mirror of lost innocence and authenticity to a civilisation that they regarded as over complex and riven by falseness.” To me, these marks felt playful, innocent and less aggressive than the usual negotiation of frustrated adolescent mischief I am used too.

 

 

As well as honesty scrawled on walls, I was also interested by people’s inhabitation of these spaces; movements that personify furniture, abandoned in angles which echo them in their shadows. Describing our surroundings with tonal shadow is how structure paintings; in light of the sun, that colossal source above. In Barreiro I acknowledged this mystification that shadows highlight, not just as tone to record people but also as shelter, granting freedom to be the natural mammals we are and emphasising humble being. In habitual shared spaces, we try to endure and welcome the slow side of daily routine and it is these repeated moments I am interested in recording; beauty in reconciliation, understanding of what we have and who we love. Are we chasing this in today’s fast pace consumerist society?

The warmth of the sun sank into people in Barreiro. Slow moving essential in the climate, acquiring time for conversations, queues at the supermarket, drifting in parks. In Glasgow where I previously lived, winters felt long, and in my work additional colours didn’t feel necessary. In Portugal I painted shadows the colour of the sky, next to silhouetted leaves that glowed yellow. Energy was undressed in Barreiro and colour could move about freely. With new recognitions of the expression of my body in parallel to the warmth I found on this residency, my paintings are feeling sexier, and I have new ideas in the making.

 

In the shadows of society’s doors poke claws,

and of chairs thrive animal hairs.

Trees are Barreiro’s town shelter

and civilians are cradled in their palms.

Let us be modest mammals,

seeing our true shapes cast on floors, all fours.

 

 

 

 

I will be exhibiting new work Thursday 5th-10th Dec in Clapham Village, London, with 10 female artists (Chica Seal, Matilda Little, Sophie Nicoll to name a few) in a Christmas Show organised by Curator and Artist Maddie Rose Mills. Looking at how we live with art. Private view from 6:30. RSVP for details here.

 

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