Art - Sheila Marlborough

Sheila Marlborough was brought up and has lived all her life in the Sussex Downs, and you can see it in her work. You can also see that she has a bright, optimistic nature, with a twist of mischief underneath. We have used two of her paintings on our covers in the past and a third in this issue, and they lend themselves perfectly to that space. Big, swirling swathes of colour, more often than not in the contours of the local hills, painted in watercolour and acrylics.

She is interesting in the art of her artwork. “I have worked in the past from photographs, but even if I take the photograph away, it tends to dictate the outcome of my work. I prefer to let the painting do the painting. I start with a couple of gestural marks on the canvas, and this leads to something which creates a flicker in my mind. This might turn into an imaginary landscape, or it might stay as an abstract work.” Her paintings are rarely wholly abstract, but they are never fully figurative, either. “They are balanced between figuration and abstraction,’ she writes in her artist statement, ‘until a faint breath of recognition is felt. A memory, a place, a different time?’ Our favourite, pictured right, is called ‘Turbulence’, a swirling symphony of blues and greens which brings to mind rough sea trips on Newhaven ferry. AG