Deborah Grice | Incandescence

Pontone Gallery is proud to mount this inaugural exhibition of paintings by British artist, Deborah Grice. Informed in part by her rural upbringing in East Yorkshire, these dramatic and atmospheric pictures draw on a profound emotional attachment to landscape and a cool eye for spatial and structural analysis. Their immersion in the English Romantic tradition of Turner and Constable is immediately apparent. At the same time, interventions in the form of geometric marks, partial grids and linear vectors add a layer of information which places these images firmly in a contemporary context.

Her skilful technique is rooted in conventional practice. Oil paint is manipulated in multiple layers to make a sophisticated surface that expresses spatial depth and elemental effect - we perceive the state of the weather and the time of day. Colour is built up in translucent and modulated glazes that articulate the appearance of mist, cloud and vapour. Man-made and natural features loom through veils of shadow and refracted light. A brooding cloudiness hangs over and suffuses all her scenes; these land and seascapes are washed through with dramatic shade that anticipates and predicts storm and tumult.

Common to many of these paintings is an additional slice of visual information in the form of the above-mentioned graphic notations, which indicate a dispassionate overview that contrasts with the expressive image-making. The artist mentions her experience as a pilot, which necessitates a diagrammatic visualisation of terrain to establish critical distance and allow for plotting an instrumental map. The additions set up a tension between the ‘felt’ and the ‘conceptual’ and point to a gap between significant memory and practical knowledge, where mystery and emotional attachment to significant landscape operate.

Common to all Grice’s paintings is the emphatic assertion of light as life-giving principle. Her scenes are revealed by sun coming up or going down, shining through cloud or glimmering through foliage, reflecting variously off sea and land. Her sun is a dramatic actor, essential to the disclosure of a world loaded with personal recollection and commitment to a sense of place.