COLOUR OF MEMORY- PAINTINGS BY CAMILLA CLARK IN CCA GALLERY
Summer Picnic
Move over Kettles Yard. The newly launched show at Cambridge Contemporary Art ‘Colour of Memory ‘is a skilled and inspiring body of work from West County denizen. Camilla Clark, brilliant enough to enhance her reputation and make her dèbut exhibition here a resounding success. She is a newcomer to the CCA – only a year ago they commissioned forty yes 40 paintings Slightly daunted, and back in her Somerset studio she tackled the Herculean task ahead. By Christmas she had finished reassuring clutch of work and began to relax in the confidence she would finish the job.
Sibilant Shore
She did. And what work it is. A sequence of impressive paintings present work from daring large scale -crimson abstract to wonderful grey and white seascapes. Not hard to guess Camilla spends so much time in her small getaway house in Devon – by the water. This is where the emotion lies, a bracing breeze blow through the pictures a mood that speaks to our primeval instinct to go down to the sea for more than just fish, but a sense of freedom, a spiritual liberation Camilla quotes. The celebrated Swiss abstract artist, Paul Klee “Colour is the Place where our brain and the Universe meet” For this artist the emotional core of her painting is paramount the memories she invests in are the prompts to memories from childhood .Between the shapes and the ghosts of boats is the light – essential to colour and as one artist remarked Klee’s colour nor Clark’s would be nowhere without the mastery of this eternal element embodied in each of their paintings.
That Evening
On Memory Camilla Clark writes
“Sometimes what we remember is not the place itself, but the colour it left behind in memory “details fade, shift and mingle with the time in between the experience and the present The result is a range of delightful paintings ready to convey us back to the wind and the rain, the warmth and the fun of earlier years. That this artist can conjure so much in one painting is a secret delight, a link between her perceptions and her viewers’ memory,
Cambridge Contemporary Gallery should be proud to present this remarkable artist to this city. Accessible – these paintings will stop you in your tracks as you hurry down Trinity Street – with no sea at the end of the street their inspiration is the next best thing.
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