Henrietta Stuart:  Woven from the Natural World

I paint abstracts in oil on canvas, based on ‘things seen’: formerly still life, now mostly landscape, in which I aim to evoke time and place, using colour and light. I paint in thin layers, laying paint over paint to exploit its transparency, a technique of which Turner and Titian were both masters.

My latest inspiration has come from visits to the West coast of Scotland and the West Sussex coastline. I was awarded a residency in Kerry Ireland in February 2019 at Cill Rialaig and the west coast of Ireland is giving my most recent pieces a deeper sense of magic.

My formative influences included Georgio Morandi, Paul Cézanne, Georges Braque, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell, and Clyfford Still. Morandi is remembered for pointing out that, “there is nothing more abstract than the visible world”.

In my own way, I set out to make abstract compositions out of things I have seen, and been moved by,

“A world observed and translated – a world created from the natural and the man-made ‘still life’: a still life both drawn and felt, as one would admire and caress a well-loved jug, or wonder at the light on the water of the Thames on a calm spring morning”.