My first exhibition - shades of lightness

 DETAILS http://www.caseytemby.com/shadesoflightnessinfo.html

What: shades of lightness - my first solo art exhibition

Where: ourmishmash, 11 Curlewis Street, Bondi.
Hosted by the lovely Jac and Ellice

When: November - December 2008

About:
A series of portrait-style charcoal drawings and mixed media paintings, manipulated through the use of shading in an attempt to create a feeling of reflection and contemplation.

The pieces have a romantic feel, this could be due to my love of writers such as D.H. Lawrence, Flaubert and Thomas Hardy. Similarly like the characters D.H. Lawrence portrays, the female figures in ‘shades of lightness’ have the feeling they are by no means fully under their own control, but impelled by forces within them below the level of their conscious will or choice.

Quote taken from the Introduction, page xiv, written by Mark Kinkead-Weekes of D.H. Lawrence’s “Women In Love”:

“Instead of portraying human beings as consciously analysable personalities, as nineteenth-century novels had done, he wanted to get at what we have learned to call the subconscious, the four-fifths of the iceberg hidden below the ego and the surface of our knowing. That deeper ‘being’ had somehow to be made visible, like the patterns produced acoustically in fine sand by invisible sound, patterns which moreover change as soon as the note does. So Lawrence wanted also to get rid of the idea of a stable ego, the belief that personality is constant, and find ways, instead, of showing human beings as fluctuating and changeable – like water, which can be ice, steam or liquid, and yet is always the same substance…”

I wanted to convey a sense of purity, rawness and truthfulness through the use of basic materials such as un-primed canvas and natural charcoal to the found pre-loved recycled frames.