| Philippa Blair |
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Born in 1945, Christchurch, New Zealand, Philippa Blair graduated with a Diploma of Fine Arts, Canterbury University in 1967. She received QEII Arts Council grants in 1982, 1984 and 1987. Blair has taught and exhibited nationally and internationally for 25 years and is represented in public and private collections in New Zealand, Australia, USA, Japan, France, Italy, Germany, Malaysia. She works primarily as a painter making expressive, semi-abstract work that reflects urban reality and the natural world with references to high tech and organic imagery, cartographic mapping, music and film. Philippa frequently employs printmaking to pursue more graphic pictorial options. ‘Traverse’, an exhibition of her recent paintings, drawings and prints, was shown in 1999 at the Spencer Gallery, Rhode Island, USA and Janne Land Gallery, Wellington, NZ. Philippa Blair lives and works in Los Angeles, California but makes frequent trips to New Zealand to exhibit and visit family."FIRENZE COM’ ERA" (Florence as it Was) These new works on paper were made in the Venice, California studio last September after my first trip to Florence, Italy. I was the Painting instructor at the Summer School at Santa Reparata International School of Art, Florence, August 2002. In December of 2003 I visited PaperGraphica, Christchurch and worked on the two lithographs that are in this show. Rolling back the skin of this astonishing city one finds the essence of recorded history and the spirit of the people, their lives, passions, pleasures, pain all psychically woven and visible in the structures and energy of the place. The first impressions and sensory impact of this amazing, complex and contradictory place, sights, sounds and smells was overwhelming. Intimidated by the huge intellectual and artistic weight of Florence’s greatness and that one cannot really measure up with it all. However being interested in original maps of the historic city center, I was drawn to the quietness of "firenze com era" the local musee storico-historico,via dell’Oriuolo, where maps, models, diagrams and paintings recorded the growth and changes of Florence from Roman times to present day. Archaeology, topography, town planning, architecture and geographical, geological issues. Space-Congestion-Space. Chaos and control. Networks and the organism of the city. I have made studies of cities with mapping diagrams as a starting point for larger painting installations before ie..Canberra, Australia (1984) France(1985) Los Angeles(1995-2003) Auckland, NZ(1990-4) New London, Connecticut(2002) New York (2003) Maybe it comes from having difficulties with spoken directions, maybe it’s just a preference for the visual diagram both hand drawn and commercially produced or just plain curiosity about finding ones way, this way…. Walking, taking photographs of walls, graffiti, billboards, marks, signs, symbols, structures, streets, skylines, profiles, plans and elevations. Building an accretion of images and focuses to re visit, study, absorb through all the senses the layers of history and the human presence, skins of time, repair and disrepair of all these stratas. Traversing the city, drawing with the minds eye and utilising memory, echoes of the past and drama of the present. The city as an organism, map and ‘culture’ connecting with the metaphor of the human body, desire and nostalgia is not a new concept, but my own experience here for the first time accentuated the art history references along with the present day accelerations, tensions, accidents, humour, music, excavations into a very rich experience that needed some distance to digest Florence. What lies beneath this surface? In September, 2002 I began the Collage (addition) Decollage (subtraction) works as a combination of drawing and painting, using layers of different qualities of paper, transparent vellum, calligraphic ink signs, layering and also excavating through to the original x |
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Philippa Blair work featured on this site:
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