RACHEL CAWLEY I PAINTER
Rachael Cawley is a professional artist living in Clevedon. Having recently retired from nearly 40 years teaching art at pre degree level, the acquisition of a dog and the intervention of Covid restrictions gave Rachael the opportunity to walk for hours every day and record the local area visually. “Often, I’d be listening to an audiobook and what I was hearing and what I was seeing would merge into a third entity which I’d go home and paint” “To me, every picture tells a story. The landscape has a multiplicity of layers, from the people who worked it through history to the scored lines of transportation, the characters involved, the flora and fauna supported by the richness of our soil and our history.” “I am interested in the ways in which colour and form can be used to tell a story and evoke emotions. I combine observation, memory and imagination with a view to transform them into visual narrative. I achieve this by recording the world around me, taking note of the contextual colours, textures, and patterns that make up my surroundings. By painting layers of pattern, sanding back and repainting I seek to weave these observations into a tapestry of narratives. Sometimes the stories are obvious, other times they are more subtle. Each painting tells a unique story, but they all share a sense of curiosity and playfulness. Hopefully these are stories that unite us all.”
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