Australia II: The Paintings

My residency in Australia came at a perfect time, after a long struggle with several friendships, I was looking for some solitude; for time to reflect on my thoughts and process it through my work.
After graduating from Pratt, my work has become less outwardly social and iconographical and has become more and more about my personal life. Where my paintings used to depict allegories, they now focus on social awkwardness and my day to day interactions with people. This is a very welcome shift, and I am happy to be able to express these feelings somehow, if not in words then in images.

I have always been a process junkie. I appreciate the steps it takes to achieve a finished composition. Each step, to me, is a sketch and an image in its own right. I begin my compositions as line drawings, which are then redrawn and painted in black and white acrylic as value studies. Using those two studies, I create small color studies in oils on paper which I use to guide me in creating the larger works. I have always strived for very complex compositions, using hoards of entangled figures, whose limbs and bodies guide the viewer through passages of light and dark and intense and subtle color.

The first piece I started during my residency is called "A Tale of Great Shortcomings." It did not come to me that it was a version of Gulliver's Travels until one of the boys from Guildford asked me if it was. The painting is about not fitting in. I wanted to focus on having a tangible space for my figures to reside in, since previously I composed with figures and half assedly painted in some semblance of a space behind them. The shift in size of the figures was a very awkward to deal with, compositionally, but I am happy with the motion of this piece.

"Great Expectations" was started at home, before my residency. I have had many interests in my life, and have always strived to pursue many of them, at the same time. This year I found myself working at a gallery, painting, working at a chemistry lab and working at a bakery. In each situation, people pushed me to spend all of my time doing each thing, and for a long while I struggled with what I would do. I have known always that if I could, I would paint full time, but to paint full time I have to have a job, and to have a job means that I cannot paint full time, and which job, to work in chemistry I need more degrees, to teach painting, I need a masters, to bake, I need to dedicate epic amounts of time. This painting is about indecisiveness, I suppose, about wanting to appease everyone and still do what I love to do. An impossible struggle.


Formally, I chose to leave the center of this composition blank because I wanted to emphasize the swirling and commotion inherent to this piece, by forcing the eye constantly around the center, without allowing it to rest there. I was very happy with the way the color structure turned out here.

I began two other compositions during my time in Australia. They seem to act as a diptych. The first is called "Not Always Greener" and the second "A Dancing Partner". Both pieces are about relationships and lack there of. The first looks at how two different girls see the world, and the second is about finding someone who understands you.

Click on any of the images if you would like to see the images larger. More work from Australia can bee seen at DariaSouvorovaArt.com.

Australia

From February to March of this year I had an amazing opportunity to live and work in Australia. I was the Artist in Residence at Guildford Grammar School in Guildford, Australia.
Since finishing school, I have had little time to work on my paintings, so this residency was an amazing opportunity. Two months of painting every day, swimming and enjoying the amazing flora and fauna of Western Australia. A perfect combination, especially during the snowiest winter in New York.


I stayed at a little house on campus surrounded by grape vines and banana trees and huge marshes that dried out during the summer to leave fields and fields of hay. I worked in an amazing lofted studio which the school provided. It was above the art classroom and looked out at the marshes from a long wall made up entirely of windows.

The light coming through the windows was amazing and the eucalyptus trees I saw in every direction reminded me so much of twisted reaching figures that I began to incorporate them into my compositions. In every direction I saw beautiful creatures and plants thriving in their natural environment, where I had only seen them secluded in zoos and botanic gardens. The "pigeon" population in Perth are actually parakeets...amazing!

On the weekends I would explore the country. I spent time with Adam, who offered me the residency, and his friend Michelle who took me around to the beaches and the botanic gardens and took me on weekend trips to the country. I saw kangaroo and emu and touched a baobab and finally saw a place where orchids grow like weeds!

An amazing creature can be found on Rottnest Island. The Quocker is a miniature species of kangaroo and lives,

almost exclusively on Rottnest. The island was named after the creatures, as they were mistaken for giant rats. The little guys are so used to company that they can be petted and scratched and seem to have an affinity for chips.

I have an obsession with water and the ocean. I bought myself an underwater housing for my camera just before the trip and finally realized my dream of swimming with the fish! I went snorkeling in the reefs on Rottnest Island! I gathered sea shells from the bottom of the ocean and sang yellow submarine to some unsuspecting fish (and the dozens of sun bathers who could hear my muffled song through the breathing hole of my snorkle,

sorry!).

It was an amazing trip and I got an incredible amount of painting done. I hope I can go back some day.

More to come about Australia and the paintings I completed in my second post, coming up!