Back to index of Nerve 10 - Spring 2007

Artist Profile - Gill Fallon-Cousins

Gill does not describe herself as a painter - she usually works on embroidery and drawings - but on occasions she finds that using acrylic expresses her feelings.
After a traumatic experience last year, she found solace in Snowdonia, where she went for long walks and did drawings of the landscape. These became the basis for her paintings: the initial shapes of waterfalls, moss, rocks and trees rendered almost as a collage on the canvas.
"I wanted my paintings to look like my drawings," she said, "but it's hard to get the spontaneity, because they are sort of structured and static and drawings are not like that."
Figures are introduced because she can't imagine her landscapes without figures.
Movies have influenced her overall colour selection. She mentions the iconic moment in director Charles Laughton's 'Night of the Hunter', in which the children flee down river from their menacing stepfather, Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum), under cover of darkness, as a touchstone. "I just like that eerie fairytale quality," commented Gill.
These pictures might appear in technicolour, but they are subdued, almost like the faded print of some classic MGM musical.
Symbolist poet Paul Valery said "A poem is never finished, only abandoned", and there is definitely a feeling that without her impulse to move on, to work in other media, perhaps film or video, her pictures could continue to be re-imagined even as they hang in an exhibition. Perhaps signing the pictures and even writing the title directly onto the canvas draws a line under the creative process.
Gill is able to present a story and provide a meaning for each of her paintings. She described them as having "Quirkiness with poignancy."

Written by Stuart Ian Burns

Email: chinnypower@yahoo.co.uk