Shonah Trescott

SHONAH TRESCOTT

by Anna-Louise Kratzsch

The young Australian artist Shonah Trescott is currently an artist in residence at the Leipzig International Art Programme.

In this exhibition she presents two series of work.

Susanna and the Elders is a series of small oil on canvas panels based on the biblical story from the Old Testament which deals with the attempted rape of a young woman by two elders.

It is a theme used by artists throughout the centuries including Rembrandt, Rubens and Tintoretto, just to name a few. Female artists have worked on the imagery as well. Angelika Kauffmann made an etching in 1762 and Artemesia Gentileski painted Susanna and the Elders in 1610.

Shonah Trescott has painted the subject of Susanna and the Elders in a rather unorthodox manner. The two elders are indicated only summarily, if at all. There are no detailed landscape scenes in the background. Like a network of rich color patches, a simplicity is achieved almost without going into any detail. The painter focuses on the female body of Susanna.

Therefore she concentrates on the figure in the individuality of its movement, its position. No faces are gazing at the viewer. Solid forms and sharp contrasting tones confront the viewer. The turmoil indicates the dark message of the story.

It is the same way Shonah Trescott treats her landscape paintings, which are also in the exhibition.

As the art historian Martin Warnke wrote in ‘Political Landscapes’: “There was a time when we liked to think of landscapes as something that compensated us for a loss. (…) It was a refuge for the civilized, in which they could experience what was missing, suppressed or forgotten in the economic, social or private world they inhabited.” Today landscape is no longer innocent, polluted by man’s devastating exploitation of nature. Landscape painting has lost the notion of romanticism but not its actuality.

Trescott is becoming well known for her use of tourist postcards as the ‘canvas’ for her landscape painting. A postcard is a snapshot. It saves the time of a written description. It is more direct. It is a medium of communication and of desires.

Shonah Trescott returns to these features by painting over the cards, picking up bits and pieces of the original picture. She surpasses the image of desire and creates new ones of subtle painting, rich in color and thick in its application.

If life is a constant journey – as it is for Shonah Trescott, being always on a move to temporary ‘sheds’ – a postcard is a reasonable medium. Oil on postcard, handy and light in weight. Ready to be shipped around the world at any time. Her images are imaginations about the places she has seen and later left.

Shonah Trescott is represented in Australia by the Damien Minton Gallery