Jilly Owen
'Midnight Garden'
Watercolours/acrylic painting/digital editing/photography on paper
My Story
The original inspiration for Midnight Garden can be traced back to a time when I would explore nearby fields, woods and riversides during walks with my mother on clear summer childhood days. Ephemeral grass waxing into gold as the evening turns, the fitful rise and fall of a legion of distant hoverflies, shades of dry Lavendar drifting from the hills, aching treetops offering a canopy of leaves beneath which we shade. All seen as colour and texture. All heard as poetry and song.
All smelled as brightness and beauty. And crucially, all sensed by one who perhaps hadn't the perspective to appreciate the depth at which these patterns would settle for future reference. And now, a generation later, this lifetime of memories, recollections and remembrance can be applied and set down onto canvas and paper and card. But rather than attempt to recall the precise colours and calls, the exact sights and sounds, across decades made distant by the turning of years, I rely on a series of collected impressions of what my memory holds.
Entirely self-taught in terms of technique, my most expressive and successful pieces draw repeatedly upon that rich history of experience within local areas of natural habitat, creating textured, multi-layered, dream-like collages that layer two, three, four memories into a single unified piece. Vague landscapes overlayered with swirls of daylight creams, alien foliage merges brightly into the middle distance, while living waters swell and dance within a slate-grey sky of curious lights. Perhaps it is my lack of formal training that allows me to embrace a clear disregard of artistic boundaries and imaginary margins. Once I've started a particular piece, I tend to allow my natural train of thought to determine which elements to add, to superimpose, to blend, into or between the sky, sea and land, however unlikely the combination may initially seem. However, it is this very method of creative autosuggestion than can often result is unexpected delights. For every unsuccessful union of natural elements, there also is a chance assimilation that draws the inquisitive eye and mind through and beyond the layers to explore their purpose and meaning. Part of my work's often naive curiosity and child-like semblance arises from my intention to encourage a viewer to survey their own imagination as a counterpoint to my own.
A mixture of watercolours, acrylic painting, digital editing and photography, Midnight Garden is perhaps my most searching instance of this. A terrain of uneven honeycomb plays host to whirlpools of ice; ghost flowers poised skywards sprout from unseen soil; living skeletal forms framed against neither sea nor sky; a phantom moon, lightless and imperfectly formed. Individually, these elements lack the meaning and context that their encounter defines. All memory, all meaning, all connecting my present to a past both precious and immaterial. Reflections of distant times made real and formed into something new and familiar, yet unknown and unknowable. My on-going commitment to creating these multimedia, multi-layered works connects me to those previous moments in my life by means of making what is impermanent in my mind, permanent on paper. Thereby bringing those moments, and by extension my younger self, and therefore also my mother, closer to me.
e-mail: EarthbornWild@hotmail.com