Adèle Love

Since graduating in Fine Art in1999, Adèle Love has exhibited across the UK with work in several galleries, as well as private collections. Previously a self-promoting artist, she learnt the business side of art as a gallery assistant in London’s West End and was a curator for a university gallery after completing a Postgraduate Certificate in Fine Art Management. Her paintings and promotional skills attracted local and national press attention, particularly for her solo exhibitions in Greenwich and Docklands. Adèle then took a break from her artistic career to raise her children.

Back from her 10 year hiatus, concentrating on her own work and actively painting once again, over the last few years Adèle’s work has taken the pure joy of painting as its central focus. Her fine art training demanded that she give meaning and dialogue to her work, but now she focuses on the deeply personal subconscious process of painting, allowing the viewer to engage in the way that has meaning for them. As Adèle moves through life, she experiences a satisfaction and greater understanding from not thinking, but feeling, and this awareness has had a great influence on her work. When she paints, the work evolves over many weeks through a very organic and emotionally driven process.

Each time she enters the studio, from blank canvas to finishing stages, she empties her mind and only brings the mood of the day to inform and shape the painting’s development. She intuitively begins each piece as a very personal dialogue in abstract colour relationships, immersing herself in the process of spontaneously laying colour down, working and re-working the surface until the perfect forms emerge which spark her imagination to inform the direction the painting will take. Through this process, memories of drawing in the landscape, the sensations of being there, the colours, edges of forms, growth and decay, the emotional growth within her as she moves through various life stages and gains a greater sense of herself, all seep into the work and spill out into the paint. Adèle enjoys the subtle interplay of figurative and abstract elements within her work sometimes choosing to focus more on the former or latter depending on where the mood takes her.

‘Painting will always be a subconscious organic process for me. Driven by colour and the immediacy of the moment, I work and rework the surface, layering the material and scraping it away until the canvas or oil pastel speak to me. Working in this way enables me to dialogue with the subconscious part of me that constantly seeks to understand wider issues of our mortality and life stages. I use my creative process to work through and understand my own changing perspectives on this.

Tension is constantly played out between landscape references and abstract colour relations as metaphorical symbols. This unmasks hidden depths and emotions I was previously unaware of and provides context for those I was.

Colour has always been important to me. Its ability to evoke feeling and create depth, often with limited structural form has been a fascination for many years. I wrote about Hans Hofmann for my dissertation as part of my Fine Art degree where I questioned whether our perception of space on a two-dimensional surface is controlled by colour relations and subjective sensation alone or whether space exists through an interrelationship of colour and form through the presence of geometric boundaries and underlying structural principles. I analysed various artists who influenced Hofmann’s work alongside his paintings to try to answer this question and my findings still inform my work and approach to painting today.’- Adèle Love

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