KATE LAWLESS: As a narrative painter interested in a fantastic reality, I turn towards Romantic Mysticism and create a consciously fictive world. The nineteenth century Romantic landscape tradition invested nature with the drama of human psychology and expression, making the commonplace extraordinary.

 

As an historically late and, therefore, anxious artist, I devise a vocabulary of images as a method of wish fulfillment, deriving my own imaginative matter out of this landscape tradition.

 

I apply oil paint more as a plastic that I can add and subtract with, rather than as a flat color to fill in drawn areas. I use images of nature, soil, sky and seasons as elements which are recognizable yet also resemble something else.

 

The surrealists took full advantage of free association while engaged in producing an exquisite corpse. I, too, use this method, combining observation and invention, giving life to invented forms and using figurative elements as agents of posture and action.