Flora Whiteley: Through dark glasses 

Flora Whiteley, Bride from L’Atalante, 2008, oil on canvas, 30.5x23cm

Flora Whiteley: Through dark glasses

Flora Whiteley’s paintings seem to sidestep attempts to apply narrative structures. Different links and associations appear to be made between the individual paintings but these are often superficial and lead the viewer nowhere. For her, the act of painting seems to come first and it is not until some time later that the questions of the why and what to paint emerge.

The source material for the paintings is diverse but like the paintings they are quotidian. Snapshots of friends, pictures ripped from the newspaper, an arrangement of objects on the kitchen table, a postcard from a show: they are the sort of things with which we all surround ourselves. Whiteley paints anything that attracts her attention, collecting images like a magpie and playing with them like a cat with a mouse. Her paintings are part of a daily routine, an imposition of rules and patterns onto subjects and styles as she tries to understand the language, clichés and the particular poetry of pictures. In each new painting Whiteley tries to resolve the problems created by the one that came before. Each solution brings more challenges – and so the process continues.