The Wake

I love the strange inexplicable atmospheres that a painting can create. My mother died earlier this year, so much of this recent work… the lying down figures, the bed in the room is informed by this time. My mother had dementia in the last few years. She was born in 1921 so she lived through the depression and WW11. I would walk in to her room at the nursing home and find her chatting to several wounded soldiers under her bed. There was someone outside her window climbing the wall and someone called Pepé living in her wardrobe. We had to ask each of them to join us for coffee.

I draw and write every day. It is here that my ideas begin as small sketches often triggered by some memory or an actual place that becomes a condensed symbol of a mood at the time.

I enjoy it when I’m in the middle of a body of work and I’m almost unable to hold all the paintings in my head and I’ve got a name for the show and I’m not entirely sure what it means. I want my work to transform the everyday and become more like a dream. I’m happy when something makes no sense, is not in proportion, but just works, then I know something significant has happened.

Prudence Flint