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- Ruth Williams
Ruth
Williams
Where Time Stands Still
Our urban lives have almost created a sensory curtailment that has distanced us from the natural world. Nonetheless, woodlands and national parks have always been a common place that I find myself encountering everywhere I travel. Using the tree as a motif in my paintings. I wish to draw an emotional connection from my audience. I wish for the viewer to be pulled back down to the soil. For me, the image of the woodland awakens an inevitable fascination inside and revisits my early childhood memories. Exploring the ruins of an old house in nearby Garryhinch Woods, attempting to climb the trees, picking wild flowers, colouring bark rubbings and envisioning the magical creatures that lived there. This firm connection is the origin of my artwork. Inspired by the work of Peter Doig whose landscape paintings hold an otherworldly atmosphere yet, a familiarity with its seductive beauty and dreamy melancholy. The adoption of the technique chiaroscuro in my work allows me to add to the atmosphere using light. With this, the use of perspective and the fluidity of the colour, a type of largescale utopia is evoked. I intentionally give the trees and surrounding woodland a subtle anthropomorphic quality that gives it a somewhat compelling presence, almost forgetting the realm of man. There is a spiritual dimension to the work as the trees come to life through the eyes of our inner child bringing certain type of ambiance within it that creating a sense of joy.