Lorraine Gill

About

“They are paintings painted around the point of contact between events and our consciousness of them. If one strips the domestic association away from the word, when applied to painting, one might say they are profoundly intimate, and such intimacy, as A.N Whitehead often explained, means a closeness to those patterns of formation which guarantee any event’s endurance.”John Berger

Lorraine is that rare phenomenon, an artist raised in the Australian Bush and Outback, who afterwards, through sheer talent, acquired and mastered the techniques of a European sensibility. Her work therefore exhibits a unique blend of the ethnic and the refined.

Lorraine Gill won her first Scholarship at age 15 to East Sydney Tech College Sydney Australia. She grew up in the Australian Bush influenced by the extremes of nature and the starkness of the environment and its vividly distinctive colours.

She came to Europe in 1966 winning a Scholarship to City and Guilds of London culminating in a Scholarship to Florence, Italy. Her first One Woman show followed in 1972 in London. Her work has been written about extensively by John Berger who has followed her progress for forty years.  She has also been featured in BBC films both on Cezanne and on her own life and work; she has also featured in books on remarkable women; ‘Interview with the Muse’ and the ‘Wise Virgin’.

Lorraine has exhibited her artwork internationally and also lectured internationally on ‘Drawing Techniques’ primarily for the Academy of the Princes of Liechtenstein, who are avid collectors of her work.

Her paintings are explorations into the nature of light and colour, using three primary colours plus white in many overlays. Lorraine spent 24 months travelling alone in the Outback Desert of Australia, sometimes living with Aboriginal People: looking and learning. She still returns to 'Go Bush' travelling in an old truck with provisions and a bushcraft friend to desolate areas.

The subjects of the works include meanings amalgamated by different events created by nature. Mangroves; flocks of birds; rock strata; tracks marking the passage of an animal; symbols; signs; the language of the land; a visual grammar. These are associations of memories and places and stories attached; “gelled” into a fixed moment of time.

“Lorraine Gill’s paintings are abstractions of energy. A seismograph of the artist's volition - work which seems to spring from within; patterned energy rising; rather than intellectual ideas set down.” Richard Walker, Arts Review

“Surprisingly the introductory signals from her work are of a warm sensuosity – but as Berger points out; only our previously established prejudices could lead us to mistake this for decorative ornamentation.” Peter Fuller