Solo exhibition

Kym Barrett | 16 May – 11 June

‘A beginning is very innocent.  It is a setting of something in motion, the destination of which remains a secret to all except itself.’   – John O’Donohue

This is as much a metaphor for life as it is for a painting. Life is always radically uncertain and especially so, during the past couple of Covid years.

My art practice has become a spiritual practice – the focused process of making paintings is a long slow path to becoming my true self. It is a teacher.  Learning to trust, surrender control, and be comfortable with uncertainty. Allowing things to unfold.  Listening, following and acting from my deepest self.

This new series of work reflects the mysterious process of its becoming.  Embracing the unexpected, letting go of preciousness and arriving at something that could never have been planned.

The work is always tethered to the visible landscape. My only intention at the beginning is to hold in harmony and balance, the tension of opposites –

Aliveness AND Stillness, Clarity AND Mystery, Raw AND Ordered, Risk AND Calculation, Surface AND History.  Not ‘either/or’ but ‘both/and’. Echoing my desire to keep in balance, all the contradictions, paradoxes, ups and downs, sorrows and joys of ordinary human existence.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Kym Barrett is an Australian painter living and working in a SE Queensland bushland. She has had 18 solo exhibitions and her work is contained in numerous private and public collections in Australia and internationally.

Barrett won the Flying Arts Alliance Queensland Regional Arts Awards in 2021.  An essay about her work and processes appears in the current ARTIST PROFILE Magazine #58, Autumn 2022.

Her work appears in the comprehensive international publication, COLD WAX MEDIUM: Techniques, Concepts and Conversations by Rebecca Crowell and Jerry McLaughlin.

Kym graduated in Fine Arts (painting and drawing) from Brisbane College of Art (now QCA) in 1975.

“My primary medium is oil paint mixed with cold wax medium and combined drawing media on board and canvas, but I also enjoy the immediacy of plein air drawing using charcoal and water media, which I later tear and collage to create new compositions.  These are sometimes starting points for the more developed paintings.  My approach is organic – a ‘listening and following’ the painting. It’s a rhythm of building up and breaking down layers, a kind of archaeology.

I try to stop just before the painting is finished (in my view, a little raw and ambiguous) for the viewer to perhaps complete the picture.”