On the Wing

Birds in flight; the bough of a tree bent by a gust of wind; a veil of mist shrouding a ravine..... On the Wing transports you beyond the mundane and the everyday. Corinne Loxton's new paintings of real and imagined landscapes appear to capture a single, timeless moment. As you contemplate the works, it is as though you are suspended in both time and space. The carefully composed and sensitively painted pictures locate you, the viewer, floating above the ground, 'on the wing' as it were.

Loxton's paintings allude to the influence of the Northern Romantic tradition, but combine this reference to Western cultural heritage with an interest in Japanese and Chinese screen and ink paintings. The works pay tribute to the European artists Turner, Constable and Friedrich and American artists Cole, Bierstadt and Moran, but rather than rendering a 'complete world' into which the viewer may conceptually enter, as these artists would, Loxton presents images which suggest discontinuous moments of passage. The compositions appear more as glimpses or isolated fragments of landscape and employ the ambiguity of form and the interplay of positive and negative space typical of many screen paintings.

Loxton's unconventional, painterly technique makes the viewer more aware of his or her physicality and connectedness with the material world. The layering of transparent colour, evocative of natural phenomena such as clouds, mist and waves, allows the paintings to speak about the unique properties of paint and the physical act of painting itself.

On the Wing is a celebration of the expansiveness, beauty and poetry of the natural world. The paintings explore how the language of landscape and the medium of paint can express the longings of the soul and the breadth of human experience. The viewer is invited to 'take to the air' to experience the freedom of imaginative contemplation and metaphorically, to cross a threshold into the realm of new possibilities.