TAHNEE LONSDALE | THE WORK

STATEMENT

Tahnee Lonsdale | “When I am halfway there with a painting, it can occasionally be thrill-ing.. But it happens very rarely; usually it's agony. I go to great pains to mask the agony. But the struggle is there. It's the invisible enemy.” Die-benkorn

I paint what I think - not what I see. What I paint is a reflection of me and an expression of how I view the world. Loneliness and melancholy are ever looming in my work. The lost and lone bear looking into the depths of a dark forest, a single character in a large paintscape. Although sin-ister at first appearance there is not anything to fear but fear itself. For instance, in ‘A Forest...’ it is the fear of losing oneself, like in a dream when something is not as it should be.

My initial instinct is with colour although storytelling plays a very significant role. Linking each paint-ing with the next is a thread of narrative, a story which runs from one painting to the next. This story began as a vague notion and has grown into the driving force behind most of my paintings. Although my work has become increasingly abstract in the last 18 months, this theme of story tell-ing has continued to be present. Text scars my surfaces, charting a history of the work, thoughts spilling out of my head and onto the painting, often incoherent and barely visible. These are created mainly in charcoal and with small traces left as reminders.

I refer to Basquiat, his paintings thick with text, ‘exuberantly spontaneous’. Doig’s ‘Mysterious Uto-pia’s’ and Diebenkorn, the large tears in his paintings which I have stolen and taken for mine.