Elaine Kazimierczu

The natural world is an important focus for my painting. Recent landscape paintings tend to the more intimate: studies of familiar meadows, hedgerows, trees, orchards and gardens. My affinity for nature and wild paces stems from outings with my father, who loved to take the family walking in woods and down country lanes. We learned the art of foraging, how to recognise edible mushrooms, where to find wild strawberries; he took us moth trapping at night and taught us the names of butterflies, trees and wild flowers.

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Elaine's landscape paintings, though semi-abstract, are nevertheless personal accounts of what she sees, based on a vocabulary of non-figurative shapes and lines. She uses this visual language to share her interpretation and understanding of the subject with the viewer. She frequently paints on a red ground, which gives energy and vibrancy to the over-painting, building up a matrix of colour and texture, like a leaf mosaic in a shaded hedgerow. She wants to represent the natural world, the paradox of ordered chaos, that intricate assembly of wild beauty. She finds the best way for me to achieve this is to work freely, so that sometimes her brushwork might seem to border on the accidental, but all the while she is conscious of the need to maintain a tension between looseness and control.

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Many of her paintings are interpretations of intimately-known localities, which are frequently, but not exclusively, in Oxfordshire, where she now lives, besides those of my native Nottinghamshire.