Painting: Rowan Paton Risby

I found Rowan Paton Risby through Instagram. Suggested by my Tutor. I was immediately attracted to her mix of collage and paint.

I love her use of colour. And her distinct style of injecting collage into her work. Her trademark of the moment are images of mountains. Photographic cut out images inserted with cloud like colourful formations. It’s hard to express why I love her work other than she uses such a variety of colours in such a way that it makes me happy to look at her work. And all the little details that are inserted.

Her work with mountains symbolises human isolation and immovable emotional objects, such as the mountains. I really love this idea. Symbolism has been something I have been using a lot more in my work recently, so I really love this idea. There are mountains surrounded by these splashes of colour and then a speech bubble appears with the word ‘HELP’. Which I love. You can interpret this element any way you want. But it’s obvious when you see that the Help is coming from a possible lost soul.

She uses many techniques which falls under the paint unit theme You are all Surface. Transparency, lines, stripes, dots, opaque colours and drawing into her work.

I was really loving her most recent work which included some flowers called SUMMER( in garden of Hesperides). I followed her progress on Instagram and absolutely love the final outcome. Again themed around mental health she depicts her mountains at the top, whilst below flowers and paint intermingle. Flowers looks collaged but I think she maybe digital printed onto her canvas fabric before stretching her board so she already had them set out.

Though saying that. One thing I do notice is she seems to have visibly stitched seams where there are these ‘collaged’ images. Like she has had them digitally printed onto her canvas material and then has to join them all together to make her piece. This is so clever in terms of longevity and makes it easier to paint over these images without fear of wrinkling or smudging.

I would love to know the origin of her mountain obsession. She hasn’t been practicing her art for a long time. Her line of exhibitions go back as far as 2015. She studied at Yale and ECA which is incredible. She studied both Printmaking and drawing, which is clearly evident in her work.

Viewing her work from a distance you would assume she was a collage artist in the sense that she stuck down the mountain images and flowers etc, but discovering that she pre-prints her canvas is amazing. I wish I had the resources to try this techniques. I guess photo transfer could work. She still is technically a collage artist just not in the way she is initially viewed.