So, who can blame me for falling in love with the art of this phenomenal artist, who hails from Australia?
This artist was born in Prague and has lived in Australia since 1997; she works from her studio in Sydney.
Marcella Kaspar’s exhibitions and prizes are too numerous to mention here.
She has also been involved in architecture and design, leading to numerous commissions.
She mainly works in oils on linen and focuses on the beauty and repetition of nature.
Kaspar uses the 17th Century techniques of opaque layering with transparent glazing.
The paintings remind one of tapestries of colour with tonal studies protruding from receding dark spaces.
Her paintings have an emphasis on colour relationships, with complex tonal variations.
She has the knack of changeability in the delicate nuances of the many colours she applies to the canvas.
Many viewers will agree that her large paintings, and there are many of them, give the sensation, not only of beauty, but a stillness and meditative atmosphere.
Kaspar has this to say: “There is an obsession in my work with the ephemeral nature of flowers and how they reflect the transient nature of life.
“There is also a constant fascination with the transparency of water and the play of light, colour, temperature and atmosphere that makes up the subject.”
Often, when sitting among the flowers in a garden, the urge to paint a number of them is great, but as our artist of interest above says, flowers are ephemeral, as so many other subjects, such as birds, and although an artist may have pencils, paints and brushes all ready for the enjoyable journey through the painting of a flower, or flowers, there are so many “distractions” to take into account.
The sun moves and, though it may be a slow movement, the shadows change constantly.
The wind comes up and blows a petal over the stamen, do we artists remember exactly what that particular stamen looked like? We move the petal back into place and, just as we take up the paint brush, it blows over again.
As artists we are extremely lucky to have cameras, albeit our cell/mobile phones which are usually at hand.
Indeed, it gives me great pleasure to sit and paint from nature, but then, as Monet commented: “Whether my cathedral views, my views of London and other canvases are painted from life or not is nobody’s business and of no importance whatsoever.”
Have you ever considered Monet’s painting of a steam engine rushing across a bridge.
He would have had to be in the exact same position, every day, in the same light for days on end to be able to paint the train in motion, so, as I said before, thank goodness for cameras, no matter how uncomplicated they were in the late 18th Century going into the early 19th Century!
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