SCHUBERT

Artist statement – Camilla Connolly . New Work 2008

Over the past six months I’ve been working away quietly in the studio, allowing my commitment to the painting process to unfold in ways that are uncensored by cerebral or intellectual concerns. There has been a great release of sorts, and a change in technical, formal and even thematic preoccupations. In the past, so much of my work has been connected with trauma – its personal impact on my life, and its ensuing impact on my work in the studio. My work had a very clear psychotherapeutic aspect to it. I never shirked from this or felt any need to excuse it, and this was and has been an absolutely valid part of my painting process. But in the past months, there has been a marked shift and a kind of painterly release from this phase in my creative journey. The developments that have transpired are purely joyful; celebratory.

Originally from Sydney, I now live in the Tweed Valley in Murwillumbah. My husband and son and I spend a great deal of time in the Border Ranges and in the landscape of the Caldera and Mount Warning. It is this landscape that has been the catalyst for these new developments.

The new works are not about the construction of an artistic idea or identity. Rather, I have been pulled towards these works, towards their production and towards the landscape and its specificities and richness… a kind of “Barbizon School meets Australian Landscape” aesthetic! I am becoming immersed in the pursuit of pure beauty as an artistic means and end in itself - unfettered by the need for theory, jargon and clever treatises. Eileen Gray – the great Irish Modernist designer said, “The value of a thing can only be gauged by how much love goes into it.” These new works are about just that. They are about the joy of painting. They are about my love for the studio. They are about the 4.30 am starts, the lights on, meditation, the palette, colour, tone, the intensity of the process, the hours and hours of solitude, the commitment to producing things that are imbued with love, emotion, dedication and hard work. They are about beauty. They are simply about the restorative, healing powers of nature, the grandeur of it – in my own life and the life of the earth. They are about my wish to communicate that. I love these paintings I am now working on and producing. They are created with joy, integrity and a great sense of freedom from my own difficult past.