Time for Observation

by Anna-Louise Kratzsch

Entering Shonah Trescott’s studio I feel the privateness of her space.

“Is it difficult to expose yourself so intimately?”

“No”, she replies. Then she pauses. “Actually, sometimes yes”.

 We are having tea in front of her personal corner. A small table, a bed, some newspaper articles on the wall and an outsourced painting, modest grey, a flower still life.

We sit and talk. Shonah needs time. Time for observation. I agree with her. It’s time to slow down. The ability to observe, once an artist’s distinction, has long been abandoned. Today, artists repeat what sells. They use projectors and quick drying acrylics. Ready, steady, go. It is the age of rapid repetition, the production line for the hungry art market.

Shonah intends to create awareness instead. She documents.

Her painting process is a question of time. As Paul Virilio argues, speed is a form of violence. Adjourning speed means pausing a violent act. An adjournment changes its nature, resulting in quality not quantity.

I look around. Oil paints, brushes, her GDR curtains in the background of a painting, fruits, sculls and bottles on her table as well as fishes ‘slipping’ on canvases which lean on the wall. Shonah calls them Sunday paintings. They are weekend observations, responses to her surroundings. “I am like a sponge. I feel different things and record them.”

Another day.

Shonah returns from a jog through the park. She tells me about the calm morning, the shallow sun gleaming in the tree crowns and the waveless river. “There are only happy people in the mornings.”

I am surprised, looking around in her studio. “Where are your landscape paintings, the big formats, you remember?”

“Sure, behind the still lives.”

It was a dry reply.

“Try again, just from another angle”, she adds later.

 Her paintings are constant reconsiderations. Shonah takes the time to destroy her images. She produces, constructs, and destroys.

“Sometimes a painting suggests wrecking it.  I couldn’t repeat what I have done on a small scale. There has to be something that goes further.”

She models chairs, oil cans and apples. Objects of daily use, like sculptures out of the canvas’ background which was once a Leipzig city landscape.

I get lost in a red squared shape. Suddenly the eye composes a red chair, the one I had just been sitting on. Then, from a distance, her still lives dissolve in random city silhouettes. They go further, start to be independent. The painter mixes different codes. Insides are turned into outsides by dissolving stubborn perspectives. A simple white line becomes a horizon, a turnover in meaning.  A still life becomes landscape.

In the studio, underneath a brown shirt hanging in the window, there are paste-like colours, floating on landscape postcards. They are lying on top of the heaters being turned off because it is summer.

Shonah grew up in Australia, in the countryside. She reacts naturally towards landscape. It is nature, churches and cranes, blue and grey skies, bridges and pathways what she observes as well as evokes. It is her art of contemplation. Landscapes are scattered around her studio table which is occupied by onions, apples, green and small ones, an oil can, animal dentures, beer; red wine; Champagne and water bottles, sketches as well as her German course book. Pastels lie on a little table on the ground. “The Art of Anatomy, a visualisation of the body during the last five centuries”, a great book.

Shonah loves black silver clips, to stick paintings on the wall and sometimes to put her long hair up. Her studio bike lies in the middle of the room.

Old, dirty rubber tiles are covered in paint and stuck on the wall, below a little rose painting and a nail box. She does everything herself, stretching the canvas, sealing, painting.

On the ground, hundreds of postcards sealed and ready for painting were once invitation cards from her last exhibition on the isle of Mallorca. She recycles them once again as painting backgrounds.  A black and white photograph of her language school where she took German classes also becomes surface to paint on. The people in the foreground are gone, houses disappeared, thick colours cover them. Only the sharp church tower is left visible.

Shonah does not fear mechanical reproductions. Nothing gets thrown away. She loves vintage and textures of used things.  She re-appropriates them.  It is a sculptural process executed both in and outside.

They turn into Shonah’s archive of personal things, into her field of observation.