Charlotte Swann’s aim in creating her landscape paintings is both to convey her feelings of awe and reverence for the natural environment, and to make subtle reference to the urgent need for its preservation. Her work explores the loss of connection and attachment to the natural environment that she feels goes a long way to explaining why we exploit and damage it beyond repair. Her paintings, she explains, are born of an experience of and connection with the natural environment created through the familiarity of walking daily in a specific place over a period of time, and repeatedly witnessing the effects of constantly changing light, seasons and personal moods on each view and each detail of the landscape. As a consequence of this, the main source of her subject matter is the landscape with which she is most familiar, that of The Black Mountains in South Wales, where she grew up.
Swann’s paintings, often grand in scale and scope, are created in the studio from a large collection of sketches, visual notes and photographic references. She describes her process of working as being concerned with the development of an ‘archaeology’ of the painting, in which layers of detail are built up in a fusion of descriptive and abstracted forms. Her technique involves painting, drawing, scratching back, dripping, pouring, rubbing, cutting away and pasting on, often allowing materials that include bitumen and earth, to form organic shapes and patterns of their own.
“Charlotte Swann’s work is typical in combining the barely discernible outline of an original landscape with layers of wild activity. It’s a great mixture – stillness and restlessness all at once. It will make us look at the Welsh mountains in a different way”. Professor Stuart Clarke
The element of beauty is integral to Swann’s concerns, both in its capacity to draw the viewer in and hold their attention, and in its ability to develop a sense of reverence in the viewer for the subject presented. In this regard the aesthetic qualities of the drawn line are of equal importance in their work as those of the painted brushstroke.
“Charlotte Swann positively write as much as depicts her experience of place in sweeping calligraphic statements.” Aidan Dunne, The Irish Times
Exhibitions
2004 Winter Exhibition West Wales Arts Centre 2003 Line of Vision, Solo show, The Llanover Hall Arts Centre, Cardiff 2003 Winter Exhibition The Taliesin Arts Centre, Swansea 2003 The Swansea Open Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea 2002 Trespass Brusnwick Mill Studios, Dublin 2002 The NCAD DegreeShow NCAD, Dublin, Ireland 2001 Frozen Pipes, The Ilac Centre, Dublin, Ireland 1999 Sensationless Vicar Street, Dublin, Ireland
