A STILLNESS EXPANDED FEATURES A BODY OF NEW WORK BY AWARD-WINNING ARTIST, CECILIA DANELL RUNNING FROM APRIL 1ST – APRIL 15TH. THE WORK IS INSPIRED BY THE ARTIST’S INTEREST IN THE PUSH AND PULL OF THE NATURAL AND THE MAN-MADE.
The large-scale paintings by the Galway-based artist represents a glimpse of the forrested landscape where she grew up in Sweden, but they could be anywhere. Through use of colour, sci-fi graphical elements and the focus on remnants symbolising human presence, Danell’s paintings depict scenes that exist between truth and fiction, pointing to something else and sometimes upending the romantic notion of nature as an untended wilderness.
Much of the work was created during the pandemic, a time when many of us found our immediate landscapes both strange and familiar at the same time. Her paintings draw on how both we and our environment adapt, adjust and form new realities after seismic events. Each canvas represents a slice of a bigger world and gives a sense of a portal to a universe larger than what you can see.
While incredibly unique, these paintings have broad appeal especially for those who are connected to nature and want to bring the outside in. The pandemic amplified our natural human impulse to get back to nature, to live in tune with nature, to re-root. Danell’s paintings prompt us to make that connection and examine our relationship with it.
Danell uses acrylic washes and layers beneath oil paint. Her signature style includes acrylic drips which add velocity and are intended to ‘break the illusion’ to remind us that a painting is a construct. She paints wet on wet, an intense process, taking about three weeks per canvas.
