Some artists aren't just poetic with their artwork, but also with their words and descriptions of their work. U.K. based artist Rebecca Bray is one of these very artists. Bray's artist's statement walks us through the emotion and the passion behind her paintings.
"With the use of abstracted imagery, I view my paintings as a tool to translate the elusive qualities of an imagined idealistic future into a visual pictorial space. Utopia is an abstract aspiration, a desire that is unachievable and is just as much about a critique of the present as a solution for better prospects. To try and achieve a Utopia would be a pursuit of perfection, an idea that feeds my work because it is tantalisingly insurmountable. The fact that an imagined mental image has wavering and enigmatic tendencies is fundamental when I intuitively apply gestural marks that evolve into representations of the voids and blurs that appear within the mind. This requires an immediacy of gesture to be able to capture something slipping away into a murky nothingness.
I choose to describe a particular element of each composition as a ‘presence’, the suggestion of an aspect created by ambiguity that often alludes to a sense of the architectural, an indication that the space is not completely abstract. The representational vagueness results in an array of interlocking shapes, a tangle of different perspectives and an uncertainty about where one thing exists in relation to another. This sets up an eventuality where there is a sense of collapse as though the marks seem to ‘judder’, generating encouragement for an encounter between the art itself and the viewer."
