STUDIO FAIRE

Located in South West France, Studio Faire offers artists a perfect environment in which to pursue new ideas, thoughts and concepts away from the everyday constraints of life. Leaving daily responsibilities behind for a period of time offers the artist an undisturbed ability to focus on creativity.

In this residency, I wanted to be open to allow the work to emerge from the experience of being there with an open and experimental process. I did not anticipate creating work that was about the local environment per se as that is not normally a part of my process. A first day walk and tour through the village seemed to impact me more than I realized and as work was completed it became clear that Nérac with its historic beauty and charm had indeed made an impression.

Perhaps because I was away from my family, or maybe it was envisioning the stories and lives that left their memories on the walls and in the streets and in the feeling of the place that an idea came into the work. The work then took on the feel of the place, the village, the time and families that came before and are living their lives there now. I began thinking about and focusing on the idea of Collective Memory. The five large paintings I created during the residency were painted on un-stretched canvas taped to a very old wall in the studio I was working in (a former garage). That wall left its mark in texture on the paintings revealing further evidence of the time spent there. Here are images from the trip including the finished paintings.

Please see more of the Collective Memory work here.

I have such gratitude to Julia Douglas and Colin Usher, proprietors of Studio Faire, for offering me this beautiful opportunity and for being so welcoming to fellow creatives. I look forward to returning.