WHEN : 30th July – 24th August
WHERE : Heiser Gallery
Cherry Hood was born in Sydney in 1950. She studied Fine Art at The National Art School, concentrating on painting. In 2000 she attained a Masters in Masters of Visual Art and a Bachelor of Visual Art with Honours from the Sydney College of the Arts. She lives and works in Sydney and has been exhibited in New York, San Francisco, Vancouver and throughout Australia.
Hood’s work consists of large scale, haunting portraits of adolescent boys (recently she has started painting girls). Specific to the artist is her use of watercolour paint which is a medium usually employed in the use of anonymous free flowing compositions, this adds a sense of ambiguity to her work and indeed the figures themselves. The individuals Hood depicts stare straight at the viewer forcing you to make eye contact and subsequently drawing you into a dynamic and sometimes even an emotional relationship. The artist has explained her models and their straight forward poses as [asking] “the boys not to smile as I photograph them, and it’s amazing the range of facial expressions you get. I never paint smiling children. That fixes a meaning and I want my work to be more complex than that.”
