Jennifer Allan

It would seem inevitable that there should be an element of surrealism in my approach - if you grow up as if ‘Through the Looking Glass’ how else are you going to see the world. My inner landscape remains disturbed and highly mutable and the use of metaphor essential both to make sense and to share experience.  Also I play with altered perspective intending to distort enough to create the experience of imbalance without losing credibility - as a result I can quite literally paint myself into some odd corners.

I find a profoundly necessary sensory and physical pleasure in the sheer process of making marks, of moving a pencil across paper, of laying one brush stroke of colour next to another, of manipulating and moulding material into a gesture or form. I sometimes find it surprising that I do not intuitively work more consistently abstractly and yet my compulsion to make marks to make meaning - to explain myself to myself - seems to demand a figurative and narrative mode. 

None the less I consider the fundamental abstract elements as structurally essential, very consciously playing with the interaction of mass and line, pattern and free form and am mindful of the oft quoted Maurice Denis “that a picture ……. is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order."