Nina Josephine Garstang

My practice currently has two strands : traditional oil paints onto canvas or panel and enamel style paints on to glass.

 

Author & Poet Richard Lewis’s description of my oil on glass paintings:

“The colours hit me up with their intensity, like chemicals chasing through my blood. It’s a visceral thing at first and then meaning emerges: I get rivers, seas and mountains, then into cells under microscopes, maps of the earth from space bleeding into brains and embryos, soft tissues and weather systems all on a single sheet of glass, yet it is still. I’m getting flashes of old masters too, like faces and scenes from other things I’ve seen dissolving away from me.”

 

My oil on canvas/panel work takes the disregarded painting rag, which holds the rejected paint from my own canvases and brushes as the object of scrutiny. The subject is suggestive of the uneasy position of painting in today’s world and taking a lighthearted poke at the seriousness of Fine Art Painting.

 

All my work contemplates the middle ground between what is real and what is not, pushing the view of the objects I paint to the point where they lose their identity, thus revealing an altered view, that could be looking to the universe or travelling deep inside the body.

 

Pondering the medium of paint, exploring: the quality and viscosity of paint itself, redolent of current opinions of the tradition of painting in an increasingly virtual world and the psychological experience of creating a painting. (Flirting with the idea of Rorschach cards and likening the state of mind to that of theta brain wave state).

 

While studying my MA in Painting I explored different media, which was a journey to realize a different view for my painting practice. Most of the work during that period was experimental, looking closely at the medium and act of painting itself and often realized in video, installation works and exhibited live painting experiments. Video & installation work is still an avenue I wish to explore alongside painting itself.

 

I am a Royal College of Art post graduate visual artist, having exhibited nationally and internationally, highlights include ‘London Art’ fair in Chelsea, Scope Miami and Paradise, RCA Milan Fine Art meets Design for Milan Design week. I have work in the private collections of Alex de Brye and public collection of 6KBW; I received the Stanley Smith Scholarship to the Royal College of Art.