Robyn Whitney Fairclough

In my work for the last forty years, color and figure placement has been paramount, more critical than “what” I am painting. For the most part, what I paint arrives naturally for me because the subject is the world of which I am a part - my family, my environment, my garden - those close to me.  They become my muse, my inspiration.

The activity of painting, the “process of,” is most crucial to me as an artist for it is in this process (the journey) that color, emotion, perception, and imagery emerge.

Upon entering the studio I don’t know how the painting is going to progress, or not, there is no plan.  I aim to start anew each day -  figure in, figure out, yellow in, yellow out - and so it goes. The process is a search, a quest for resolution.  The painting has to work as a whole - every space, object, figure,  affects the other - therefore, they need to work together to make the painting whole, complete, resolved.   For me, this process/journey has to be experienced through an intuitive and fervent manner as well as an intellectual one.  In the intellectual, the more cerebral position, I stand back from the painting and think, contemplate.  I aim to make decisions that are based on what is working in the painting or what is not - again, it’s figure placement, colors, over-all structure and spirit that are crucial.   

In the intuitive manner, I respond to the canvas by mark making, painting in a visceral non thinking way, unplanned and deep in the “process”.

It often takes me years to finish a painting; and sometimes a work does not get resolved.  I paint over paintings, large and small - I frequently butcher them, they become overworked with no feeling of spontaneity or freshness.

Over the last several years I have learned, at the urging of a past professor,  if frustrated, turn the painting around, against a wall - to not over paint, to not obliterate the entire image - to simply let it be for a while.   After weeks, months or even years when I face the troubled painting again, I can often see a strength or a direction in the work that I did not see before. 

The experience in my studio is an intense one - a search for meaning, for what moves me - for beauty, harmony and at times discourse. 

At the end of the work day, regardless of what transpired in the studio, I experience that this mysterious activity of painting often feels like a dance, a dance between two voyages, the intuitive and the analytical - an experience I find most difficult and challenging, but also most astounding and provocative.