About my work

My main theme is horizons, meaning my ever-repeated attempt to remove or question limitations. I try to interpret this boundary line. Oil paint is my great love and I feel very at home with this medium. It also gives me a lot of freedom in technical terms.

In my abstract landscapes, all reality is replaced by an emotional altercation, whereby they usually have no relation to any existing place. Even where the title mentions a particular place, the image itself is actually a
metaphor.
I am well aware of the notions of romanticism in painting (as well as in music of course), although this may not immediately be recognizable at first glance, since my paintings are very abstract. However my goal is to capture and provoke a state of emotion.
Earthen or deep blue masses of colour often dominate the foreground and the sky but I usually leave the middle ground under defined. Instead, I try to give the horizon line an especially alienated light.
In some pictures, shadowy figures appear, occasionally at the bottom of the picture, or they float in the sky or in water. They are just
there, well out of any correct perspective. These figures conduct themselves like observers; they belong in the image and yet at the same time they are alien. They are a projection of my own identity within the painting.

My representational figurative works, which have been engaging me more and more in recent years, are about people or animals and the depiction of relationships. With my own photographs of everyday situations, I let myself be inspired into an exciting and as opposed to my landscapes, contrasting way of working. In spite of the sujet, I try to develop the original focus away from apparent realism, in order to achieve an broadened perception. Here again, I use deliberate reductions, shades and glazes to transform the image. I aim to give the topic a metaphysical, almost surrealistic presence.This is the same goal as with my landscapes, to grasp a state beyond reality. In both of my genres, landscape painting and figurative painting, both colour intensity and the depiction of light play the main role.
In my graphic work on paper with their sometimes dark allusions, the working process is emotional and spontaneously fast, so the very opposite to my laboriously protracted oil paintings.

Rosalind Porter