Jerwood Painting Fellowships 2013

Sophia Starling

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This video introduces the artistic practice of Sophia Starling and how it has grown during the Jerwood Painting Fellowship. She is investigating what abstract painting can be and what a frame can be. Through addressing the boundaries by taking the formal elements of a painting and putting equal weight on paint, material, and support. She begins a piece by exploring an image or shape that she finds interesting through various drawings. There is a revisiting and a redressing of the paintings working with the physical material rather than depicting and illusion of an image. The process of stretching the support creates the composition. Things get unpeeled, movement occurs equivalent to a gesture in a painting. She speaks on re-considering how to display the excess of the canvas that is not on the stretcher. Also, the freedom the work has with multiple display capabilities when installed depending on the gallery its in. Most painters make the support or get someone else to make it, build up the surface to finally paint an image on it. She values each part of developing the work equally. Using each material to create the painting. There are motifs that she revisits. Some have derived simply from the challenge she finds in stretching a canvas on a circle as oppose to a rectangle. There is a movement in her work even though it is technically hung in one position. She speaks on how the process and rigour in her daily practice helps when she doesn't know what to paint.