Pamela Honeyfield: Statement

Pamela Honeyfield’s artistic practice is situated within the tradition of Australian abstract landscape painting. Working mostly with oils on large scale canvas or linen, the works embody a timeless preoccupation with the landscape and one’s position within it, insisting on a woman’s place within a historically male dominated genre.

 

She says, “The work will often take on a life of its own and each colour and brush stroke made, will dictate the next. In this dance and relationship with the surface, I allow the colour and the placement of marks and shapes to play and interact”.

 

Her paintings are gestural documents of the artist’s sensitive perception of landscape, capturing the mood, atmosphere and raw energy of places travelled and experienced. Music and the action of painting are integral to the process of collecting a visual language and translating the inner dialogue of the artist. Here, it is observation and memory that ground the gestural mark-making, recalling the experience of environment and imbuing it with expressionistic colour, movement and texture.

 

For Honeyfield, “There are many variables when creating a work and you have to be willing to lose and regain images until it's resolved. The best marks made and paintings created are when I seemingly disappear for a while in my work, and when I return I know that I have had some kind of 'happening' with the canvas”.