Claudia Carr

The opening sequence of Sergio Leones film “Once Upon a Time in the West” epitomises the kind of tension and pace I want my paintings to have. It’s a long slow scene in which there is very little dialogue, and little happens. Leone builds an overwhelming sense of anticipation, often menace, through his indulgent focus on seemingly trivial events, such as the constant circling of a fly around the butt of a gun, or the flicker in a shaft of light.

My current work explores the territory between ‘still life’ and ‘landscape’, between the intimate and the epic. I paint from the landscape of debris and clutter, organic material and small plastic animals that accumulate in my studio. Because of specific lighting conditions, random juxtapositions of objects, and the process of long slow looking, the perception of scale is skewed and the spaces become ambiguous, evoking prehistoric/post apocalyptic wildernesses, wastelands, secret gardens and savannas.

The atmosphere of the image, and the journeys running through it, rely as much on chromatic tensions and the organisation of rhythmic structures, as they do on the illusory quality of the image itself. Recent paintings have been exploring the elasticity within GREY; the activation of colours within a narrow chromatic range by means of their particular interactions...

I am also excited by the fickle, volatile nature of visual reality, so my process involves a constant questioning of how to respond to the perceptual inconsistencies that exist in any long stared at scene.