Texts & Critics

Solo exhibition  " Horizonte  (Horizons)"  in  Palais Stutterheim, Erlangen, Germany   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, Erlangen News - January 1994

Group exhibition  -  Kunstverein Erlenstegen  in Kunsthaus, Nürnberg  2006 

Rosalind Porter is an artist who sometimes walks doubtfully between the worlds of the understandable and the incomprehensible. The horizon becomes her emotional and painterly hold, which shapes her visions; which helps her to fixate and yet pulls her out into the world beyond people and things. So the images impose on her as reports from the inner world of a painter who seems to live "exposed on the mountains of the heart" (a Rilke quote). She, the trained solo cellist, compares each picture with a concert that is performed every evening anew and every evening in the best possible way: vision and at the same time the hard search for perfection and incontestability. But in her pictures the incomprehensible begins to overlap with reality, which of course still remains in delicate formal quotations: the difference between muse and angel is insignificant anyway. The artist penetrates far beyond the personal experience into the as yet undiscovered areas of his and our soul. And when we say: "I like it" "It's nice" or "I don't like it" "Terrible" (what a revealing judgment, it speaks of our fear) says a lot more about us than about the artwork. The inner landscape also includes uncontaminated virgin forests ... .. - forgive me for the transition, which at first seems simple - the walk into nature promotes access to the soul landscape in most cases. So the landscape has a firm place in the history of art.

Barbara Bredow - Opening laudatio  -  November 2006

Solo exhibition   " Zwishen die Zeilen  (Between the Lines)"   in  Sparkasse Fürth, Germany   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 - Fürth News - December 2007

Solo exhibition   "ZWEITEHAUT   (Second Skin)“    in Kunstraum Rosenstraße, Fürth, Germany

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.

Uwe Schein  - Opening laudatio - Dec. 2011

Solo exhibition    "ZWEITEHAUT  (Second Skin)" in Kunstraum Rosenstraße, Fürth, Germany   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  - Fürther News  December 2011

Solo exhibition  "CORNUCOPIA"  in Zeltner Schloss, Nürnberg, Germany  2018 

Oilpaintings and work on paper.

With her latest exhibition, Rosalind Porter opens a horn of plenty (lat. Cornucopia) of atmospherically dense paintings. A more or less visible horizon constantly divides emotionally charged compositions into an above and below. In these interpretable ambivalent landscapes a melancholic state of limbo prevails.

Porter’s major theme is delimitation, even ambiguity. Indirect light seeps from diffuse clouds of colour and illusions to trees are again to be read anthropomorphically. Although the onlooker cannot avoid recognizing landscapes, derived from the impulse of colour gestic, Porter's paintings fascinate in that their abstract quality is an autonomous pictorial fact.

Richly oscillating between Dionysian and Apollonian temperament, the painter plays virtuously with the sublime’s romantic legacy. Within this artificial weather cauldron, the human being wanders around as a solitary staffage figure or its dematerialized body shell drifts beyond time and space.

Exposure of the deeper-lying preoccupies Porter all the more in her work on paper. Here, creating painting surfaces with layered mutilation can be understood as a metaphor for the artist’s general interest in making the existential  tangible below a visible facade.

Dr. Harald Tesan, art historian, 

Press release  -  Mai  2018

Rosalind Porter's Art

A short introduction by Dr. Joachim Stark, MA  History of Art

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. Salvation and redemption were relevant in his own world and Jerusalem and The Holy Land were no longer the sole localities for religious miracles and promise.

In the 17th century landscape painting developed into a separate genre. The Dutch showed the change of the seasons and integrated people going about their daily life into their paintings. The French concentrated on heroic landscapes, where antique temple ruins or mythological scenes reminded of triumphant past epochs.

Landscapes, parks and gardens, where exuberant celebrations and erotic adventure took place were typical for 18th century painting. The English 19th century artists depicted landscape as a place of work, where the laborers’ huts stood in gloomy corners and the aristocracy and nobility was to be found in the lighter parts. 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 typical 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, spiritual perception and disposition. Here, she is following in the tradition of Romantic painting. This may not be obvious at first sight as her paintings often appear strongly abstracted. However the intention  is  to display and to evoke emotion.

The 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 the 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.

Rosalind Porter’s landscapes and also her occasional excursions into the figurative genre with still-life and interiors, they all show us situations where people are restricted and controlled by overwhelming forces. They show the entanglement in earthly existence with all its bondage, its duress and futility. Signs of hope appear merely on a distant horizon.

Rosalind Porter’s psychic landscapes may derive from a subjective, individual attitude, nevertheless they portrait general aspects of the conditio humana in a world where the individual claims his rights of freedom and fortune. However one is at the same time subjected to mundane forces and to reification.

Dr.Joachim Stark MA,