BLEEDING DAYLIGHT
M-ARTS PRECINCT
10 JANUARY-2 FEBRUARY, 2020
MURWILLUMBAH
Exhibition Statement | Pennylane Shen
BLEEDING DAYLIGHT
The bold floral abstractions of ‘Bleeding Daylight’ convey young love in a primal language of colour and gesture. What emerges is a paradox of profound opposites. Foolish, youthful passion is freeing but all-consuming. It furnishes hope yet brings despair. Such love is perfectly flawed in its overwhelming intensity but also beautiful and magical in its imperfections and surprises.
Inspired by action painter Joan Mitchell, and the lyrics from Bruce Cockburn’s song “Lovers in a Dangerous Time,” Llewellyn Skye’s effervescent, expressive bouquets are rendered with confident brush strokes in vibrant colours against dark and muted backgrounds. The work, which marries abstraction and realism, mirrors the sweetness and inevitable pain of the ardor of young romance, which, like the springtime, blooms with vigor but soon betrays its fragility.
‘Bleeding Daylight’ recognizes that with change and loss comes a darkness. But it also affirms the need to struggle to live in the moments, however fleeting, of beauty and light.
- PENNYLANE SHEN
Metro Gallery Aquisition | Julius Killerby
BLEEDING DAYLIGHT
"Two recent acquisitions for Metro Gallery are Llewellyn Skye’s The Other Girl and The Garden of Eden IV. Despite their heavy abstraction, both pieces are vaguely modelled on bouquets of flowers, a subject that has preoccupied Skye for several years. Flowers, which typically populate the canvasses of rudimentary still lives, are instead used by Skye as a visual mechanism to convey feelings of love and youthful passion. Rather than over intellectualising these themes, she expresses them in a primal language of colour and gesture."
"In The Other Girl, the viewer is presented with an explosion of pinks, reds and purples, set against a black backdrop. One’s first impression is of the stark contrast between something and nothing. Gestural brush strokes burst forth from the canvas and the viewer perhaps thinks of the Big Bang or an atomic explosion. On the contrary, however, this painting, as the suggestive title implies, is meant to represent something that does not physically exist: love, jealousy, sexual passion. Masterfully, Skye has aggrandised what are often perceived as petty emotions, giving them the weighted significance of near cataclysmic events."
