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"River 1"

Acrylic and collage on panel

760mm x 760mm x 55mm #3078

This painting has been shortlisted for the

 

Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition 2025

 

and is therefore currently not for sale. ​

1 River 1 Context .png
river 1 frame .jpeg

River 1 is framed in a beautifully made, minimal white-painted timber frame.  

River 1 frame.jpeg

The frame has a small shadow gap between the edge of the painting and the frame. 

Painting details:

1 river detail 1.jpeg
1 river detail 3.jpeg
1 river detail 2.jpeg

If you are interested in buying or knowing more about this painting please contact me by clicking  

This painting is one of a pair, ‘River 1 and River 2’, both of which are 760mm x 760mm x 55mm and created using acrylic and collage on cradled panel.

 

In both of these paintings, I returned to a recurring theme in my work, the Cumbrian landscape - this time focussing on my experience in and around rivers.

 

I wanted to portray some of the physicality of the experience of being in a Cumbrian river by working at a large scale, where the relationship of the painting to the body is very immediate and where, for example, I am not using my wrists to make marks but rather my whole arm. Also, it is an experience that when I work on the painting, I am pretty much ‘in it’ as I make it. 

 

The immediacy of this way of working means that as well as the memory of the river-experience informing the work, it is also a state in which I am very much working in the present and responding with my whole body to events that happen along the way, during the process of making the painting itself. 

 

Sometimes a colour or a junction of shapes catches my attention and leads me down a route of its own. By swapping between the positions of standing back and of ‘diving in’ to work on the painting, it gradually develops as a to-ing and fro-ing between a state of control when conscious recall, reflection and adjustments of and to what I am doing are the guiding force, and a state of release as the process of painting absorbs me and intuitive mark-making takes over.

All images are copyright © Julia Chance 2019, unless otherwise stated.
 

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