I asked Natasha ( natasha-cinnamon in dA ) if she would agree to an interview and she was kind enough to accept. I do thank her for this opportunity to talk about her work and understand better her approach to painting. The interview is appropriately ready for Traditional Art Day so there it goes, with a brief presentation.

Poet Robert Lowell once wrote: “The eye of the painter is not a lens, / it shivers when it touches the light.” And philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer said: “Beauty has the ways of light.”

Natasha’s handling of the light is one of the constant values in her work. A subtle, sensitive moonbeam illuminating intimate, sober sceneries. There is no arrogance in her paintings. The patient stripping of the forms from the superfluous, the precision of her compositions and her refined colours communicate strong emotions and an intense view of things.

I have gone through her paintings over and over again, admiring their essential beauty but also struggling to define what seemed to escape me every time. I finally realized that, to me, one of the most powerful elements in her work is precisely what is not there. What she never says –or paints. The silence that is as eloquent as the pauses in a conversation or the deafening questions that are never answered. Forgive me for yet another quotation, but Cervantes wrote somewhere in his Don Quijote: “He wants to be praised not for what he said, but for what he never did say.”

This pregnant silence basking in the moonlight revealed yet another of Natasha’s secrets: she is not a realistic painter. The objects we see on her canvases are echoes of a dream, it’s not reality Natasha paints but its projection in time. I would say her work is essentially abstract and conceptual but I have said enough already. Let’s hear what she has to say –or chooses not to:



Q: When did you start painting?

A: So long ago I can't actually remember when it was! I've always been interested in painting and drawing from a very young age. My mum still has some of my earliest work, from the age of 22 months! I absolutely loved art classes at school. I was at my happiest when I was creating something, and I can still remember the smell of the thick poster paints we used at primary school!

Q: When did you realize painting was more than a hobby for you?

A: From a fairly early age I decided I would like to be an artist, and while I was at high school, art became the most important lesson for me. I remember taking my exams at the age of 16 and only really caring about how well I did in art! But thankfully I passed everything except maths (we won't go into that...ha ha!), and the icing on the cake was getting an A-grade in art. But for various reasons I didn't go to art college and spent a few years in my late teens wondering what I was going to do with my life. Even then I wanted to become an artist, but I guess I thought it seemed like an impossible dream and I lacked the confidence to really go for it. I don't come from a particularly artistic family, everyone really just has regular jobs, so it wasn't as if I had a role model in that respect who could encourage me. But to cut a long story short, I was in my early 20's when I decided that it was definitely more than a hobby and I wanted to try to make it my career.

Q: There are a few still lives in your gallery but they are obviously not your main subject. How did you come to the repeated-theme stage of your work?

A: Still-lives/objects used to be my main subject. I basically used to paint those and a lot of abstracts up until the winter of 2003/2004, when I started experimenting with landscapes. I'd been thinking about painting landscapes for a while, but I didn't want to start any until I was sure that I would be creating something unique and not just copying other people's landscapes. I really had the desire to paint landscapes in a new and different way. Then one day I happened to see a photograph of a ploughed field at wintertime, with a row of bare-branched silhouetted trees in the distance, and it occurred to me that this was the kind of landscape I wanted to paint! Not the usual pretty but slightly twee landscapes - all sunny days, fields of sunflowers and leafy trees - but the more desolate side of the landscape in the middle of winter, when everything is still, when the trees look stark and the ground is hard with frost. I like the textures of the ploughed fields in winter, the muted colours, and the sculptural shapes of the trees. There's nothing overpowering about winter, nothing 'showy'. It has an understated beauty which I try to replicate in my paintings. When everything is stripped back like that, shapes and textures become very important. And that really interests me. I never tire of painting landscapes, and they are always evolving.

Q: Have you always used subdued colours? Why?

A: Not always, I remember when I first started painting abstracts, I used fairly bright colours, but gradually, over a period of time, my abstracts became more inspired by natural objects and colours, such as stones found on the beach, and so my colours became calmer and more subdued as a result. Many of my still-lives consisted of these muted tones, with maybe just a 'hit' of a stronger colour somewhere in the painting. Then when I started painting landscapes, the colours were subdued, as I said before, because of the subject matter. I would say that generally, in my home and clothes as well as my art, I prefer muted colours - to me they're beautiful and sophisticated.

Q: Do you consider your work “simple”?

A: In some ways yes...in that, I try to strip away all unnecessary elements when I'm making a painting or a drawing, to try to find the 'essence' of the scene. I try to describe with paint what excites or interests me about the landscape. So my work may initially look 'simple', but believe me, it's incredibly hard to make something that simple, and ensure that at the same time it retains a sense of depth. To know what to leave in and what to take out is sometimes very difficult!

Q: If human expression is necessarily a “drama”, a staging of intimate scenarios, what is your " play " about?

A: It's about going against convention, a sense of loneliness and isolation that I think we all feel from time to time, it's about feeling a sense of time passing; a feeling of nostalgia maybe. It's about appreciating the beauty in simple things, or things perhaps not traditionally considered beautiful. I suppose most of all it's about helping people to see in a different way.

Q: Since I’m a fractalist, I’d like to add a final “tricky” question. What do you think of Digital Art?

A: I think it's a very interesting art form in it's own right. I was thinking just the other day that I wish there was more time in a day (or a week, or a year!) so that I could teach myself digital art. I would love to have a go at creating some in the future, and some of the digital art out there is incredibly inspiring. But I think personally, for me, nothing beats the feeling of working with paint. I love mixing the colours, I enjoy the process of applying the paint - with a brush, my hands, palette knife or whatever, and then I scratch or carve into it sometimes to create different textures. It's a very physical process. I love to sit there in front of a blank canvas and try to make the image I have in my head appear on the canvas...and get myself covered in paint in the process!