Credit: Rory Rae
I have released myself from the shackles of observation and let go of depiction to explore with greater freedom the language of painting which is colour and shape to make these paintings that I call Internal Landscapes.
— Isobel Brigham
Born in 1963, Isobel Brigham is one of the golden generation of British painters from 1990s, which included Cecily Brown, Peter Doig and Chris Ofili. Throughout her career she has developed her understanding of the materiality and expressive nature of paint and its ability to convey an emotive “language” which the spoken word lacks. This has culminated in her recent paintings, in which she explores the inner life of the spirit and of subjectivity aware of itself, in other words, into the development of the language of painting.
The artist describes each painting as an Internal Landscape. Each begins with a crisis, a struggle, or a turmoil (sickness, loneliness, alienation, abandonment), but then resolves itself through aspiration and longing, while leaving behind on the surface just the trace of sentimentality for past struggle and pain. The artist brings us into the real, material, concrete world of the sensuous, with the gentle power of colour and glorious organic form, in order to give us a richer knowledge of the principles of painting in contrast to the language of other art forms, such as poetry and music.