Magdalena Skierniewska
“The minute I sat in front of a canvas, I was happy. Because it was a world, and I could do as I liked in it” (Alice Neel, 1975).
My work consists of six oil paintings on 50x60cm canvases. All paintings have a similar format and, in the tradition of the life room are often left ‘unfinished’. Due to my consistent interest in the human form which developed over the years of studying Fine Art, the paintings are not so much concerned with the looks, but with the expression of feelings during the observations and the painting process. Starting off with sketches of friends and strangers around me, I’ve moved onto painting the nude (female and male) and throughout my time spent in the life room with two strangers, I have started to develop friendships with them. The main focus of my work is to portray a different visual story through the posture of the figures and the application of colour. The objective process of painting figures as they are becomes a subjective one; which is personal to me as the artist. I portray the figures as I see them and the more time I spent on each individual painting, the more emotion I felt it conveys to the viewer. I have explored a range of traditional painting mediums in testing the idea of portrait painting, and see this research activity as open-ended in the possibilities for future research.
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