May Wentworth Art
May Wentworth in her own words:
In 2009 while working at Art Images Gallery and having long since giving up on my artistic ambitions, I was asked to join the Superstroke Art Movement by the founder, Conrad Bo. This led to a significant shift not only my approach to my painting from a super realist perspective to a more expressive idiom, but also ultimately to my becoming what I was meant to be: a full time artist. I was later kicked out of the Superstroke Art Movement because my brushwork wasn’t violent and expressive enough and I have since become part of Conrad’s other art movement, Superblur, which focuses more on the word ‘blur’ itself.
Firmly grounded in the present in its commentary, my work is a process that starts with image scavenging (a term coined by Ida Appelbroog), mostly from the internet, but also from other media like books, magazines and newspapers. This is the starting point of the creative process for me.
The images deal with contemporary themes, such as power, politics and the intrusive and isolationistic nature of technology. Commodification of the self is explored and the blurring and obstruction of the eyes or faces signify the levels of separation in showing the self to the world. The work is also based on memory, albeit one’s own or a fabricated or staged memory. It is experience bound by emotional structure and an intellectual history. The frequent appearance of the men in suits denotes both a position of power and the constraint of uniform. However, the viewer is always encouraged to create his own narrative. Time and timelessness are explored within a broad idiom of history, entertainment, language and fiction.
The blurred portraits require a different kind of cerebral application, a more direct cognitive approach. The images are all manifestations of identity and carry different complexities both for me as the artist and for the viewer. A mistake frequently made is to assume that no thinking is involved in creating these images. Leonardo Drew expressed it perfectly when he said his work was thought based, rather than idea based and this definitely applies to these paintings.
The act of painting is what unifies everything in end, this is what creates the visual language, the identity.
Contact May at inappropriategallery@gmail.com
