Katherine Edwards McCubbin - Portrait with Fornasetti Candle

Open: Wednesday 12 - 4pm; Thursday & Friday 11am - 4pm; Saturday 11am - 3pm; and by appointment

A face, ethereal and evocative, emerges from an atmospheric swirl of brush strokes. A flower blooms as a constellation in the foreground, and the sense of peering into both a microscope and upon the entire surface of the planet, is blended in a playful interplay of shape, form, outline and colour. Welcome to the world of Katherine Edwards McCubbin. A mid-career artist making her emphatic statement in her own very personal visual language.

Her pictures, mesmerising swirls of reduced colour and mythic apparitions are a product of a lifetime of dreaming and exploring the word of interiors and the broader world of exteriors.
Within that exchange of enclosed spaces and the embrace of the physical word, she has found the ambiguities, and the suggestion of so much more.

Description

The title of this show “Alchemy”, continues Katherine’s preoccupation with water (childhood memories of Sydney harbour), natural history and how these experiences can transmute into magical visions. Italy’s Baroque water fountains and sculptures have been the catalyst for the subject matter of these paintings, the artist travelling there when possible to draw and later transform these studies into paintings in her St Kilda East studio.

She has created a symbolic visual language, a mark-making short-hand of outlines and apparitions, via oil paint, across the canvas surface – spots, spirals, faces, flowers, snails, shells, bow-ties and ribbons – appear atomised or vaporised in a swirling vortex of texture and form.