For the Menhirs series I have explored mines and mining sites in Romania. These visits stimulate all my senses and feed my never ending fascination for painting complex patterns, textural surfaces, and a dramatic play of light and color.
The old buildings are a huge portion of a mining town’s culture. Once ubiquitous in the Romanian landscape and central to the economy, many mining sites are now relics of another time. There is in these paintings evidence of a physical and grinding way of work, but also the hope for a brighter post-coal future.
I find these abandoned structures resonate with me on a number of levels – as a symbol for society, but also for the human condition. I want the work to embody the sense of vulnerability, fragility and disfigurement that I perceive in the subject.
My paintings are a personal expression of my interest with the visual effects of color as revealed by the play of light across an array of objects. I attempt to portray the infinite beauty of color not only in every object itself but also in the interaction between objects, their shadows, and the surrounding space as light travels over and among them.
The focus is on the beauty of the everyday objects that surround us – a beauty that we take for granted as we are often too close to see it.
Subject matter: urban landscape focusing on Australian suburbia.
I am interested in taking the neglected, seedy corners of suburbia and wringing out images which, though rooted in pesonal experience will depart to form a unified image and a new identity. I aim to take everyday objects and heighten their significance so that the viewer could learn to appreciate each object as art in itself….
My work aims to explore how people use space in a modern urban context and the assumption of the permanence of our way of life and our cities. I am intrigued by the patterns we make on the surface of the earth and how we ‘own’ it, although our own existence is transitory.
Patterns of habitation’ is an amalgam of many elements, memories, signs, language, fears and desires, all floating somewhere in space and time, dream and reality. What is to be and what is yet to come. Assuming forms to only then disappear…..
I am challenged to think alternatively which I believe is important for artists seeking truths hidden in an everyday life characterized by generalizations and the ‘average’. Artists should provoke thought in others by providing alternate ways of seeing the world.
Delia Vilhelm
Artist