Claire Cansick

Painting is a direct interpretation of my experience of nature, imbued with imaginary imagery, tied to history. This may be a modern day cliche, but nature is my refuge, holds my sense of perspective and release from daily stresses. Painting also gives me the same pause for reflection, and so the two meet.

I swim in the North Sea, taking photos of waves with an old waterproof camera; I have thousands of photos which I use as initial source material, so the paintings are as if from a swimmer's view. I like to anthropomorphise the sea, or have it cradling skeletons, as an indirect way of placing myself and humanity within it, within the natural world as a reflection of my concern for its welfare. I interpret what I see there within a tight palette; violet tinged dawn, distant ships, the mysterious dark depths, while also incorporating historical fiction which I like to listen to while painting. Being inspired by literary art forms is important to me, creating a link between words and images, the pace of a work of fiction slows down time, immersing me in another world which comes through in my work, slowing down to observe complexity and inspect my imagination. Colour is pushed to each end of a limited palette of four.

Using diptychs makes me think differently about composition, symmetry and simultaneously the disruption of it, how a wave disrupts the horizon line creating two sides. It serves to reference ideas around duality; physically, in the light surface and dark underwater of the sea, in the ecology and our industrialisation of the sea, impending waves and distant horizon, and also metaphysically; thinking about perception of truth, light and dark in equal measure, the reality of nature and being. Painting moving water acts as a meditative exercise, the complex repetition of undulating waves replicated in action of the hand, translated through taming its unpredictability.