Texts / Critics

Dr. Joachim Stark  MA

Since the Gothic art period and even more so since the Renaissance, landscapes have taken up a substantial part in painting, often enabling the viewer to identify with his own surroundings.

In the 17th century landscape painting, the Dutch displayed the change of seasons and integrated people going about their daily life into their paintings. In 18th century French painting, heroic landscapes with antique temple ruins or mythological scenes in parks and gardens, where erotic adventure took place were typical. The English 19th century artists depicted landscape as a place of work, with laborers’ huts in gloomy corners and the aristocracy set apart in the brighter areas. It was invariably the case however,  that  landscape  painting  had the aim of enticing the onlooker’s gaze to roam across vast spaciousness and deep into nature itself.

Rosalind Porter’s landscape painting however does not use any of this typically traditional characteristic. Her pictures seldom have a specific relationship to any existing scenery and even then, where a painting title may stipulate a real place, the actual picture represents a metaphor for something else… that is, spiritual perception.
Only in this respect is she  following in the tradition of Romantic painting. This may not be obvious at first sight as her paintings often appear strongly abstracted. However the artist’s intention is to display and to evoke emotion. Behind Pendle Hill (2009), Hommage (2006), Wanderung mit Vater (2011). Surging World (2012).

Her compositions convey throughout, dark and sometimes claustrophobic moods.  Earthen colours or masses of deep blue dominate the foreground,  a midfield is seldom visible. Instead, a light spreading out over the horizon seems to show a path away from the shaded, heavy foreground areas, which have yet to be crossed and overcome. Whether the often lonely and blurred figures in the foreground will succeed is not apparent. Embedded (2009), Waiting for the Tide (2008), Signs (2010).

These soulful landscapes may derive from a subjective, individual attitude. Nevertheless they portrait general aspects of the conditio humana, where some signs of hope appear merely on a distant horizon. Fleeing Horse (2004), Three Times Tomorrow (2005), Illumination II /III (2013), Warm Shadow (2014).

In Rosalind Porter’s representational paintings and drawings, she subtly depicts human interrelationships or dependencies between people and/or animals. The Striped Shirt (2009), Intimacy (2009), Shallow Water (2010), Girl (2011).

"Horizonte"   Erlangen News  January 1994

There is a highly sensitive spirituality in the static richness and melancholy of these dreamy-poetical landscape visions -  laming silence and timelessness – which tries to comprehend nature in a language of diffuse, introvert and irrational colour, yet simultaneously wanting to grasp the dialogue’s evoked emotional exuberance …… the images live from subtle, sensitive colour values and she knows how to elicit a magical atmosphere. These pictures very slowly make their impact.

Ute Koch

Fürth News - December 2007

The British painter’s perception is in the truest sense romantic. Not cheesy, not schoolgirl-like, but more like how Goethe saw the world in his Romantic period: very much based on scientific laws, but with an unsolvable riddle slumbering at its core, enveloped in a veil. Structures gently vibrate, making waves, sometimes caused by the cleverly arranged colours, or because of the paper, as in the series "Torn". Here is an artist who looks boldly behind inner curtains.

C. Schuller,

Vernissage  „SECONDSKIN“  09.12.2011  Artroom Rosenstraße, Fürth.
We find here a strong colour sensitivity and also something which in today ‘s contemporary painting is hardly ever  conjured up so sensually and compliantly; the virtuosity of light. I am convinced that Rosalind Porter  commandingly  lives out  the concert of colours and light in her painting as an inevitable continuation of her musicality and so is driven to new heights. In these landscape-paintings, we rediscover everything that has been so fervently captured on the canvas.

U. Schein.

Fürther News  2011

....and Porter is always exploring the horizon and distance. She embeds hints of  very delicate lone figures in her landscapes. Such as in “Winter Journey”, a painting where you can almost physically feel the icy air. Shadowy bodies flitting across the sky get caught  by an air current. The artist needs these elements as a metaphor  for what lies behind her ideal landscapes. In contrast is the large format "Girl,  the portrait of a child, painted by Porter with great sensitivity. In her choice of implementation –using almost dry paint and very subdued colour – she  eccentuates the fragility in the girl’s face.

M. Reinhardt