Rebecca Bergese
Rebecca Bergese is a painter based in Reydon, Suffolk. Born and educated in London, she studied psychology and art in her earlier years and worked in the NHS before returning to her love of making things, completing a BA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art in 2009. She has continued her practice steadily ever since.
Having lived most of her life among the concrete and tarmac of the city, she always longed for the organic world and for the comfort of big green spaces and open landscape, with their offer of consolation and retreat. In 2017 she moved to Suffolk, where she has made her home.
Artist Statement
Since moving to this greener world my practice revolves around my relationship with these real environments, as well as the imagined, internal, green shelters of reminiscence. The shifting light also plays its part in our sense of ease or insecurity. The dark can be scary but it is also concealing and consoling. At the edge of the darkness transformations take place.
Some paintings refer to the dreamworld of childhood, or to half-remembered locations soaked with the uncertainty of an adolescent, waiting on the brink of adulthood. Others draw on observations of real landscape often in quieter, barely populated locations. I hope that they provide a space or a prompt for the viewer's own musings and reminiscence.
With this in mind, the paintings are not predetermined but grow out of the meeting of paint and paper, or canvas. They are the result of observations, drawings, or experiments. They could be the world at the bottom of the garden, or under the fence perhaps, or the dark and silence of the fading light amongst the trees. In respect of these small unacknowledged places, I make the work from materials that are as close to organic material as possible: wood, paper, plant glues, and oils without attempting to polish out their characters.
