LOUISE FENELEY
“Who has not collected a shell, a feather, a twig bent just so, an intriguing natural form? From my collection of curiosities of nature these very small treasures are given a new life in a painting, a resurrected life you could .say, simply because they are loved enough for me to do so.” - Louise Feneley
Based in Adelaide’s sea-side suburb of Marino, Louise Feneley draws her inspiration from the sea and the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. Not too dissimilarly to the grand tradition of the nineteenth-century Romanticists, Feneley portrays the powerful immensity of the ocean and the comparable fragility of human experience. The swirling movement of wind and water influence her landscape paintings, many of which appear to exist in a numinous space between the water and the land. The artist’s still-lifes can also be interpreted as a reflection upon nature’s duality as giver and destroyer: the bounty and detritus alternate in a continuous journey of artistic explorations.
“Louise is drawn to the numinous and to liminal transitions between opacity and transparency, to translucency and density and to the shimmer of light and mother of pearl opalescence. There is a subliminal aspect in all her imagery that is present in the simplicity and abstraction of her pearls and droplets and again in the surging complexity of the cold sea. Louises’ aesthetic is sensory but it is not entirely sensual, it is filtered through an astute intellect giving her work an authority that is profound and conceptual.
Clearly Louise loves nature but she is herein making art and her compositions most frequently present a pictorial space that rises up before us as a vertical visual field, a relative - distant as it is - to the celebrated abstractions of mid twentieth century painting. The effect of this is that rather than being merely appealing views of observed realities, they present themselves as icons to be revered and as ideas to be confronted, purposeful and challenging rather than passive images compliant with lifestyle decor.
She is indeed a master of the subtle and of the personal but Louises’work reaches into realms and ideas of universal urgency.” - Godwin Bradbeer, July 2024
