Think Less, Feel More

About

‘Think Less, Feel More’ is the second solo exhibition in Edinburgh by up and coming abstract artist, Alice Boyle. Her paintings plunge you back into the feeling of winter while at the same time developing colour to soften the cold and break through to the promise of regeneration. Appearing in the specially adapted, ‘Edinburgh Ski Club Building, in the Heart of the New Town, for the last week of July and the first 10 days of the fringe ONLY!

The exhibition and title are inspired by Waldemar Januszczak’s review in the Sunday Times on the Abstract Expressionism exhibition at the Royal Academy in London 2016. At the end of the five star review Januszczak states, “There’s not enough emotion in our art any more. We think too much and feel too little”.

“I attended the exhibition and got an overwhelming sense of freedom from excessive over thinking, which inspired me to loosen up my work. I stopped flitting from one idea to the next and decided on one colour palette and idea, which I explored vigorously yet spontaneously. My aim here is to illustrate a relationship between thinking and feeling in my paintings, by adding elements of intense patterns and repetitions to many of them, which represent, ‘Thinking’, in amongst a background which is more uninhibited”. Can our feelings ever be separated from our thoughts?

“My Artwork is about the journey of learning about the spirit of the world and ourselves and accepting all the imperfections. I want people to feel there is a joy and playfulness within my work and titles, which comes from enjoying the process”.

Alice works with layers of plaster because this process and the artworks themselves then have a sense of the primitive, giving the feel of pictograms or petroglyphs of ancient caves.  Alice makes marks into the plaster with, various utensils, forcing her to be spontaneous as the final layer of plaster dries rapidly.  It commands her from the start not to be too precious and to let her piece take on its own life.

Alice returned home from 6 years of exhibiting and living in London and now works daily from her studio in Edinburgh. She gained her Masters from Edinburgh College of Art then came up with and co-directed, the internationally acclaimed project, ‘The Graffiti Project’, at Kelburn Castle, Scotland. The artists urged Alice to focus solely on her artistic practice, which she has done since early 2008.