I have a new website, shelleypenfold.com

please check out my website, save it as a favourite, new work will be posted there... considering keeping this blog going but for another project... for now, shelleypenfold.com and thanks for following me here.

show at Deluge opens tomorrow... installation shots soon!

http://www.deluge.ws/

came across this... "edvard munch was known to leave his paintings out in the rain on occasion, a habit he explained by saying, "it will either kill them or cure them"." maybe seen as anti-aesthetic but in my own explorations and observations of the world, the broken down and withered has a vulnerable beauty impossible to reproduce by any other method.

I was outside laying down some colour and the rain started to come down.  This is what is going to essentially paint this painting, this being the rain water.  I had to let go, wanting to direct and play around, I needed to lay out small areas of colour and let that something else take over.  A playful game or a game of chance or maybe it isn't a game at all but just that the painting is involved in become itself more than I used to think it did.  Leaving the unknown and unpredictable to dictate what happens next, what happens when I see it, I don't even think that subjectivity is being considered at this point but rather it will come with the paintings.

Feb. 13th part II

"Mr. Mister" oil, acrylic and spray paint on raw canvas, 48" x 48"



"Blue Lightening" oil, spray paint, oil stick, acrylic on raw canvas

Feb. 13th

"Fountain of Youth" acrylic, bleach, rain, snow, fabric dye, spray paint on raw canvas

"Walkway" oil, acrylic, spray paint, river, smoke on raw canvas

pursuing the poetics in everyday life and drawing a parallel to the practice of painting.

an observation in the Fall, the way the leaves stained the pavement led to an experiment of leaving the leaves to rot or stain a canvas left outside in the elements.  this led to working with raw canvas and paint, among other things, revisiting a method from the past and always enjoying Frankenthaller, Morris Louis and the beauty of the stain.  From here... more canvas being painted and left outside, left in the rain, snow, in rivers, in fires, bleached, hosed off, baked in the sun and played with, paint applied, sprayed, drawn on, what other actions can be done?  Traveling with the work, bringing it from studio to home to studio again.  Building a relationship with it, love/hate and despair and finding some on the back and the front, going between the two.  Letting it settle, reeking of the past, of experience, old and beaten up, flying a flag of truce, tattered torn but still intact, made to be pristine and perhaps hiding this experience pretending to be wide-eyed innocence.  naive beauty.  Hanging up to dry, bringing it in from the rain, caring like it is an extension, carrying it around like a weight, like something you can't get rid of even if you tried.

in progress

March/April, 2013
Drama of Perception

Stephanie Aitken
Katie Lyle
Shelley Penfold

Curated by Sandra Meigs

http://deluge.ws/dupcome.html

Tanner explained his painting simply, “I put lines here and here.” For Evan, it was more about color recognition and experimentation, “I drawed black on the purple. Look, little dots right here. Now I’m using purple again.” Other paintings were more representational or even sparked storytelling. Julia K. told a teacher about her painting, “Once upon a time there was a bear in the house and there were two little people and they were scared and a little fish came and the bear was crying. I’m done.”

"Three Places' fabric dye, bleach, washing machine, oil stick, acrylic on raw canvas

"what is this a drawing of?" "my 4 year old niece drew it" "she wanted to draw three sisters" "but there are only two of you who are sisters" "but maybe she wishes she was part of the two of you, being a sister to the two of you, instead of niece and a daughter" "maybe" "or maybe she just likes sisters" "maybe they are the sisters from something she was reading, like cinderella or something" "but maybe she wants a sister instead of a brother" "who knows what she was thinking at the time?"

"a stage is a place where anything can happen" a painting is a place where anything can happen. does that sound kind of hokey? maybe all the characters and everything on the surface is. it could all just disappear.

and if there seems to be a slight anxiety or something teetering on the verge of slippage, it's because there is!  An anxiety in the unknown, of what could happen when materials combine.  And a language of marks that document the making.

new works, in progress

September 20, 2012

"What concerns me when I work, is not whether the picture is a landscape, or whether it's pastoral, or whether somebody will see a sunset in it. What concerns me is - did I make a beautiful picture?"
"Every so often every artist feels, 'I'll never paint again. The muse has gone out the window.' In 1985, I hardly painted at all for three months, and it was agonizing. I looked at reproductions. I stared at Matisse. I stared at the Old Masters. I stared at the Quattrocento. And I thought to myself - Don't push it! If you try too hard to get at something, you almost push it away." HF

September 19th

September...

September 2nd

Y.L.M.D, 40" x 60" oil, oil stick on raw canvas, mounted on stretched canvas