For Marisa Purcell, paint acts as a medium between the empirical world of knowing and a release into the unknown. As she works, her method stretches paint’s physical qualities by combining thinly veiled layers of colour, allowing paint to pool and dry slowly. Through this she builds strange relationships of shape and scale while marking graphic rhythms at varying speeds and densities, risking awkward crises that stand as metaphors for everyday life.
Purcell employs her depth of experience with oil, acrylic, watercolour, and drawing media to conjure an internal landscape at symbiotic play with notions of micro and macro cosmologies. She says, “the most beautiful thing occurs when discord is integral to the resolution of a painting: there must be something at stake, or you haven’t pushed your own sense of what you’re capable of doing”.
Marisa holds a Master of Visual Arts from the Sydney College of Art, University of Sydney and a Master of Art Administration from University of New South Wales, College of Fine Art. Her work is exhibited nationally and internationally and she has received numerous awards including as a finalist in the 2014 Blake Prize, a Highly Commended in the Waverley Art Prize (2013) and a Post-Graduate Award, University of Sydney (2006/2007). Carol Schwarzman
