Andrea Byrne - Wallflower

Wallflower

“I love a ball ! there’s such an air
Of magic in the lustres’ glare,
And such a spell of witchery
In all I hear and all I see,
That I can read in ever dance
Some relic sweet of old romance…….”

The Country Ball (1820) Winthrop Mackworth Praed
 

“The large-scale flower paintings are filled with varying flora devoid of hierarchical species. As a celebration of fecundity the grotesque accompanies the beauty, which is contributed to by the outsize scale of the canvases. All conventional notions of beauty hold within a prescriptive quality and flowers enchant with their ephemeral seductiveness.

The paintings attempt to capture the stain and residue of the flower’s presence whilst always hoping to convey their eventual absence, whether that is prior to the flower’s demise; the encapsulation of the moment of its life; a frozen flutter of a petal or its transient balletic excitability in a breeze. In the most obvious sense flowers speak of their own mortality, the ‘seen’ between the ‘unseen’.

Speed of application and continuity are of major concerns in the initial stages of the making of the work striving to emulate a sense of temporality - recognizable yet amorphous forms in the process of sliding out of their time and eventually out of our vision.

The dialogue within the paintings concentrates on life events in which our emotional histories and identities are created. There is an attempt to articulate that which we carry with us everyday.”

Andrea Byrne