Different, yet the Same

Women Who Are Different,

yet the Same

Women In Spring, Summer, Autumn & Winter, 2008-2009

These paintings are composed from sketches from poses in life drawing sessions of 3-10 min each. You'll see figures repeated in the series.

Outlines. Lyricism of the human form. In-between places. Playing. The sensuality of bodies that become landscape, the colour of flowers. Fluidity, colours of the seasons. Rhythms of drawing and painting, line and planes of colour. Figures in oils disappearing into, emerging out of elemental colour that washes over white. White that remains as beautiful thick watercolour paper. Dance with the figures in their painted incarnations.

Brenda Clews - Women In Spring, 2008

Women In Spring, 2008

Oil paint, pencil on

Strathmore 150lb paper

24.5" x 18", 62.2cm x 45.7cm

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Women In Spring

Sweeping paint, Zen-like. Let image emerge. Only now I sought to include detail, painted lines, concentrated effort. I wanted the women, who are one woman, drawings from one life drawing session placed on the same page, to be colourful like tulips in the garden. The figures appear in varying stages between painterly and a reliance on drawing, and I don't seem able to move away from that. I outlined boldly in paint tonight, resisting the urge to use coloured pencil, then wasn't sure, then knew that from across the room there would be more definition. The final criteria - can I live with them?

The grouping; the way they create the space around them; their relation to each other; the view they allow the viewer; some emerging out of the washes of colour, or disappearing into...

The fecund forces of Spring, who can define it?

-Toronto, May, 2008

Colours dart at me. Touch, and pull their washes back. Can I shroud you in the colours of the background, so you'll fit your pattern, so you're not cut out from it?

I'm not different from the scenery I surround myself with.

Look closely, there I am.

With my addiction
to you.

"The process of the painting is intriguing. In the colours arise myth, story, woman and a spirit speaking. Wow! The poetry is amazing with the painting because of the images of woman - a woman, not several. The same woman, many roles, many moods, many masks, many realities, many, many, and the heart, the addictive heart, focused on one." Myna A., Minneapolis, US

The dreaming figure, Velázquez, the pose, that angle of the face, that gaze out of the frame of the painting at the viewer, often appears in Velázquez. Rodin's Thinker, her head is obscured however-thinking upwardly rather than inwardly. Garden party paintings, like any group of tulips in orange and yellow and pink. There is a long and honorable tradition of nudes in painting. The body as ripe as a flower.