“IN THE DAYTIME”

Paintings by Rebecca Partridge

I once asked Rebecca Partridge why most of her landscape paintings were painted as vertical tableaus, and her answer was as simple as it was helpful;

«Because I see them as windows.»

Utilising this new piece of information I started viewing her work a little differently. Suddenly it was as if I, the onlooker, could place myself in front of the painted canvases and use them as a certain type of machine – a time and space machine – with which I could allow myself to enter her world. As seen through the lush brush strokes emulating the fog over a moor, the crooked edges of a tree line disappearing into tactile oblivion, a sea confidently crashing into existence. It was as if I could move into the framework – practically become Caspar David Friedrich with the walking stick in The Wanderer Above The Fog – expand the painting in all directions around me and poke the stick into something previously untouched, something private, that now also belonged to me.

In conversations she has professed that a set goal in her art practice is bridging the gap between painter and onlooker, and presumably doing so by setting up a line of communication that extends itself through the painting.

This, she struggles to achieve, by painstakingly immersing herself in the painting process – turning it into an active meditation – and transferring that effort into the very pigments of the paint, leaving an energized, painted field for the onlooker to in turn immerse herself in.

A landscape if you will, embedded in a phenomenological co-existence.

In it you can ride the crests of metaphorical waves, see them build up to sweep across cold, blue imaginations. Hover above a vast expanse effortlessly, and stretch out coolly on the great divide. Plant your feet on warm beaches never before experienced, on heaths never before felt. See trees rise towards the light in forests that apparently hold no names.

In it landscape can explain itself in transversal geometry, allowing that which is normally perceived as chaotic clusters in nature to perform as ordered systems; carefully conceived patterns that invariably echo the intuitive balance of nature. Beautiful shards, like in a microscope, that reveal the backbone of an entity that ordinarily evades the eye.

Language one suspects is often insufficient in transferring ideas and views, so painting then one hopes can possibly expand, and broaden, the horizon on which our life’s exchanges are made.

This at least, is the hope that Rebecca Partridge’s paintings have come to install in me.

- Bjarte Alvestad, 2011