Recounting Stories of Palestine

Last weeks exhibition for Al Madad Foundation at the Artspace in Chelsea was a huge success. A collection of 12 paintings by 6 London based artists along with drawings by children from Palestine were exhibitied. The 12 paintings were on sale with all proceeds being donated to Ghirass Cultural Centre.

29th March 2012

sabinaaa:

Sweet Dreams, Gerard Stricher. | via gerardolino

26th March 2012

Concept

No matter what their surroundings or backgrounds, children all around the world dream, feel and play the same. These human parallels between our worlds is the focus of this piece.
The landscape that suggests violence and destruction, has an emptiness that aches to be filled. Like the artist who transform a canvas into art, a child transforms this land into a playground, both artist and child using the human tool of creativity. In paradox the bleak landscape offers escapism through imagination and creaticity.
Working to close detail and intricacy, I had first approached the perfectly polished and dauntingly large canvas with the perfectionists fear. To overcome this I had to distort, paint and purposely destroy the image. Ad libbing and working freely with oil colours erased the fears of mistakes and hopes of perfection. Letting go was essential to the process when voicing the ideas of a childs creativy, dreams and fun. The mistakes I made were also important to the process. The motifs that I had built that I eventually grew to hate, needed to be erased and destroid. Mending, meant a process of painting and changing with more feeling and spontaneity.
The girl who draws, and the colours that proceed from her represent the charity’s ethos of Art as Therapy. The abstract and expressive patterns represent the girls spontaneous and subcontious creation. The birds that grow from her creations express her feelings of beng free and escaping away.

26th March 2012

I’ve used more paint to erase than to describe

21st March 2012

I hate what I’ve done. I realised I made the transition from illustrator to artist. starting with an illustrators mind and plan. Then I decided to use paint but still kept to the original plan. Resulting in a messy and chaotic painting. So I’ve decided to white out all hte figures I’ve painted. and now I will go for free colours and patterns, inspiration coming from Nancy graves and Gerhard Richter.

(photoshop sketch)