An artist's practice

* The exhibition was postponed due to Covid-19 but will open to the public Saturday 25 July ending Sunday 2 August. Open daily from 10AM-4PM.

Three of my digital collage artworks have been selected for display in the Lion Gate Lodge, Royal Botanic Gardens Sydney, as part of the PL💚 NTS exhibition in March/April 2020.

Artwork by Neha Gupte @theblckpen

The theme of the exhibition is our love of plants and the essential role they play in our lives.

Plants give us life. They make our air, our food, our clothes and our homes. Without them life would cease to exist. The Royal Botanic Garden is a living collection of thousands of plants in Sydney’s CBD. This oasis is the city’s lungs, the green heart of Sydney and Australia’s oldest scientific institution.

PL❤NTS is a brand new exhibition in the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney, brought to you by Foundation and Friends of the Botanic Gardens. For this exhibition, we are shining a spotlight on the incredible diversity of plants living here and around the world. And we’re also telling the story of their friends: the many pollinators that disperse seeds and keep the Gardens humming.

Excerpt from https://www.rbgsyd.nsw.gov.au/whatson/plantswithaheart

My happy publicity shot for the exhibition

My small garden is a place of rest and a source for personal and artistic growth. My recent works explore aspects of my garden and its place personally, globally and historically.

The three works that will be hung in the PL💚 NTS exhibition further develop my garden imagery in the traditions of Trompe l’oeil and Baroque still life painting. These digital constructions incorporate personal symbols in new narratives about what I wish for the world.

Idyll 39cm x 50cm Digital on paper

Prosperity 39cm x 50cm Digital on paper

Sanctuary 39cm x 50cm Digital on paper

I am aware that I’m a slow blogger. Except by definition I’m glacial.

I’m pretty prolific when it comes to drafting posts though. There are lots of draft posts in the pot. 29 draft posts abandoned. This is one of them.

I came across this never-finished post from February last year. The title ‘Desperately seeking..’ pertained to gaps/wants/needs in my art practice and here is the list I wrote back then:

Technical foci looking for a SUBJECT:
oils, layers, use of transparency, [representation of ] folds, fur, weaving

Expressive/aesthetic obsessions looking for a FORM:
Fibre (texture, pattern, colour), digital (layers, textures, objects), painting (surface, texture, objects, Pareidolia)

Symbols and images looking for a PERSONAL METAPHOR
Rabbit, flower, kikyo, moon, fish

At the time I was reflecting on what I was doing and wondering how to resolve some of the many threads that I was working on.

Post my exhibition SPIN I can look back on this list with some pleasure. I understand the things I was seeking then and can now say that I have found some solutions.

Regarding Technical foci looking for a subject: oils, layers, use of transparency, [representation of ] folds, fur, weaving
I continue to build technical skills. Back then I was testing how to achieve depth in my paintings, together with stylisation in representation of surface and form. Right now I am focused on using transparent layers in my oil paintings and continuing to develop mixed media layering in acrylic and collaged works. The subject matter I have found revolves around water, spherical forms and still life. These objects and materials are an obvious choice for technical studies. Here are some examples:

Regarding Expressive/aesthetic obsessions looking for a form: Fibre (texture, pattern, colour), digital (layers, textures, objects), painting (surface, texture, objects, Pareidolia)
This list of ‘things’ are endlessly intriguing me. I play with textures, patterns and shape in felted forms (I need to take good photos and will dedicate another post to that). My current digital works have more depth and detail and I am experimenting with dimensions and materials to better represent atmosphere, surfaces and objects. Digital and fibre forms have proved worthy to play out these obsessions.

Regarding Symbols and images looking for a personal metaphor: Rabbit, flower, kikyo, moon, fish
These symbols still appear throughout my works and have now been joined by new fetishes—such as pineapples, bugs, mist, stones, crows and the colour yellow. Through my series of digital works all these images have become compositional threads. But they’re more than just visual devices. These things appear and reappear in my real world. They appear in unexpected ways thereby always drawing attention to themselves. If some of my works border on the surreal it may be because the real and the imagined are dancing together through time.