This plangent piece returns to the mysterious territory between landscape and archetype with a tempera work that draws on the delicate landscape palette of Poussin, the bold, furious brushwork of Jackson Pollock and the famous memento mori hidden in Holbein’s The Ambassadors. Et In Arcadia Ego responds to the theme of a morally ambiguous garden…
Archetypes 2: Titan (2018, watercolour)
This dramatic piece develops the artist’s characteristic ‘impasto’ technique, creating light by working into the surface to render rough areas of paint smooth and lucent, creating areas of a dreamlike violet within the energetic, almost violent textures of clashing and blending purple and gold. The Titans, gigantic children of earth and heaven, rebelled against their…
[VISITING ARTIST] The Mower Against Gardens (2018, acrylic)
This striking work by London-based artist Ariella Wolf was created using a brush formed of natural rosemary leaves. The paper was placed directly on grass in the open air within an urban park, before being strongly worked such that the paper has become heavily textured by the surface underneath. Coupled with the vivid greens and…
Archetypes 1: The Erl-King (2018, watercolour)
This series makes a deeper exploration of themes seen emerging from the ‘landscape of the soul’ concept elaborated in Landscapes 6: The House In The Woods. Drawing on Jungian notions of mythic archetypes as the deep structures of culture, society and the human soul, The Erl-King opens the series with a dark and driving work…
Landscapes 6: The House In The Woods (2018, watercolour)
This evocative work revisits a more traditional use of watercolour paint but retains the artist’s characteristic bold brushwork, offering up a landscape of shadowed forms and far-flung perspective that hints at faraway topographies of mystery and longing. Though included in the ‘Landscapes’ series it is more of a ‘landscape of the soul’, that tempts the…
[VISITING ARTIST] Homo Homini Lupus (2018, mixed media)
Visiting artist Dorothy Locke joins Pipsinella and Libby Williams in stylistic and thematic dialogue here around ideas of nature, wildness, predation and the food chain. The tiger stands in for Homo sapiens as apex predator in this piece, which mixes mundane references to mealtimes and the body beautiful with darker intimations of the raw violence…
Landscapes 5: Tado Taisha Chochin Matsuri (2018, mixed media)
This mixed media addition to the ‘Landscapes’ series continues the international and more urban themes emerging with Container Port, depicting one of Japan’s great Lantern Festivals. Dynamic lines suggest the movement of crowds toward lighted lanterns in the top part of the piece while multiple red circles against the white lower section imply a multiplication…
[VISITING ARTIST] Appropriation (Frida Kahlo): 2018, collage
The piece references traditions of creative re-use and re-appropriation, asking: where do we draw the line between the imitation and development inherent in the notion of ‘artistic tradition’ and when does this spill over into parody, plagiarism or appropriation? Here Pipsinella references the cats of the popular ‘I Can Haz Cheezburger’ internet ‘meme’, repurposed image…
Landscapes 4: Container Port, Hudson Bay, NY (2018, mixed media)
In this departure from the more bucolic themes of Landscapes 1 and 2, and showing a development from the split urban/rural consciousness of Landcsape 3, this striking work uses an unusual technique fusing and tearing the thickly-painted paper to create mirrored shapes present in their absence and ‘reflected’ around the fold and tear. Container Port…
[VISITING ARTIST] Sun Screen Ice Cream (2018, mixed media)
Continuing her ‘Trousseau’ series in a new medium, SUNSCREEN ICE CREAM THIS IS THE FUTURE is Pipsinella’s most recent work exploring themes around holidays and leisure. Working at the intersection of the contested and ever-changing spaces of travel, meteorology and our boundaried, human bodies, Pipsinella’s work continues to challenge our settled notions of artistic category….
Like It Was Done By A Toddler 
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