Part 4 Distillation – post 9
It was at this point in my work that the devastating news of the Amazon rainforest fires began to sweep the headlines. I found myself responding to this in the studio after a session of painting when I wrote the words at the bottom of the painting “Will it be there?” There was an overriding feeling of something ending for future generations.
The first images related to the fires as I worked through what it was that I wanted to say in the paintings. Certainly the initial pictures carried a sense of horror but I wanted to get beyond that somehow.
I wanted to get to the point where the paintings spoke of a deepening need for care for the world and its natural environment. Perhaps for that to happen the images needed to express a kind of beauty in the face of the devastation.
In preparation, I carried out research into images of the land and its environment. Years ago I had had the experience of driving through a large bushfire in Australia and the experience has never left me. The heat was intense and the sounds of the burning much louder than you would think. But the Australian eucalypt which cover three quarters of the landscape have a natural ability for rebirth. They have adapted to fire and resprout or have seed which survive fire. This is not the case in the Amazon rainforest but I was searching for this sense written by Tredinnick of landscapes forever dynamic spaces, and that we are not simply onlookers but inherently locked into it. So this began a series of works in sketchbooks to explore this topic.
I began working out from photographs of the actual fires to explore new ideas…
The word ‘fragility’ came strongly one morning in the studio and I worked with that in the images…
I felt the images were beginning to hold that feeling of the need for our involvement not just our despair but still a way to go….
This body of work is ongoing…
PATRICIA FARRAR 