Climate Change - Pandemic - Life In Isolation

Living through the three phases of 2020 has transformed my painting, probably forever. 

The great tradition of landscape painting was mainly been the domain of men according to my late husband Peter Fuller, the British art philosopher and critic. Peter Fuller's life and work is the subject of a new screenplay this year titled Modern Art.

I have spent the last 10 years attempting to prove Peter wrong. But I mainly stuck the the genre of seascapes. In this painting of a house and wildflowers on top of the White Cliffs of Dover I take you through my painting, during isolation, of a sublime landscape and the reasons I chose this scene as my subject.

After I started the painting I was explaining to friends that I had seen this incredible meadow of wildflowers that felt really different. A couple of days later my friends sent me an article in The Guardian about the regeneration project on the White Cliffs of Dover, which includes this meadow.

The Kingsdown Leas is a site of specific scientific interest and lies within the Kent Down area of outstanding beauty. Small tress and shrubs have been cleared to allow the rarer plants and wildlife species to flourish.

My first reaction to Covid-19 was this large painting of England and France from an aerial perspective. I live on the Kent coast opposite Calais.  As a child I often looked through my father’s 3D surveyor glasses at aerial survey photographs, fascinated by the trees, or spikey dots, jumping up at me and the changes in terrain. 

Early in the Lockdown, I was in quarantine and realised I needed something familiar and contemplative as my subject. I wanted a painting to get lost in every day, something familiar with no pressure.  My subconscious took over and the familiar became unfamiliar with a merging of the images of Covid-19 that we see online and a geographical map of where I live.

The flow of this painting moves from the beauty and calm of the translucent sea to the spikey hashtags, dots and shapes on the land. Like looking under a microscope at a virus, the land pulsates with movement and action. Shapes float and move over the canvas, some fast some slow like outbreaks of Covid-19 and isolation bubbles.

The Need For Change

Around the world among News media, Koala Bears have become the metaphor for the non human effects of Climate change.

Stephanie Fuller has been a professional artist for 4 decades.

All her paintings created between 2010 and 2018 are in private collections around the world.  The artist feels that beauty and horror go hand in hand in great art and continues to paint nature, the sea and still-lives (a life long pre-occupation).

Stephanie Fuller was born in Australia, lives at the seaside in Deal, Kent and has lived and worked between Australia, London and Los Angeles for the past 40 years.

For all enquiries contact Stephanie Fuller at stephanie@stephaniefullerartist.com

VIEW SHOP

Among my new seascapes are these watercolours. Working outside on studies for these larger watercolours during Lockdown has been invigorating. I start with a walk and meet an artist friend on the beach. We sit 6ft apart and paint and chat about art and life.

During this time of disruption and social distancing my small new works are available direct from my online shop.

Click here to view all.

My work has been in museum and gallery exhibitions, art fairs and sculpture parks in Australia, England and California.

I trained as an artist in London in the 80s and have consistently exhibited since my first group exhibition in 1990.