Pale Offerings Print

Maevaughn Chiu ~ b1966 Artists statement I am an abstract painter. My interest lies in the relationship between colour and form and the emotions they elicit from the viewer. Drawing on my own relationship with art and design, often using shapes she associates with particular chapters of my life as an aid to the indistinct memory of sensation. The shapes and forms are part of my internal visual library. Images accumulated from my earliest memories of living in Malawi, West Yorkshire and South Sudan. I paint using my intuition. With small sketches and cut outs to plan the composition I allow the colours to evolve to create a mood or feeling to each piece. Using acrylics, emulsion and chalk paints, I enjoy the sense of applying the paint, in an almost meditative way, finding the right curve or brush stroke to create the balance I am looking for. The images at the forefront of my focus at the moment are from my early days at art college in the 1980s. The playful, colourful imagery of post-modernism Richard Rodgers, Ettore Sottsass and the 'Memphis' collective, and Missoni. With a nod to the art books that were part of my childhood, Wassily Kandinsky, Ferdinand Leger, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and more recently discovered Agnes Martin. I am always fascinated by modernist paintings in galleries. The minimal shapes frequently framed in ornate traditional frames. I love the tension between these two, the final object being a fusion of two visual languages. I like to source old frames and give them a new life, painting an image specifically for that frame and creating a new and 'desirable' art object. My work is in private collections in the UK, the US and Canada. Maevaughn Chiu