Light, Blue, Disco is an exhibition of works on paper that explore the limits of watercolour painting. Each work carefully considers the pushes and pulls of watery bleeds, hues and the subtle textures that arise as part of the drying process. They were painted by using a super-wet process to create numerous layers of washes, colour pools, and gestural shapes before figurative symbolic shapes emerged from the surface. I liken this process to a slow-motion dance of sorts, when light, shapes, and movement collapse together, leaving a lasting impression, like a time-lapse image taken at a party.
As these works required patience to watch and massage where the bleeds and colours finally set, a series of small intimate works also evolved in tandem. Painted in the studio with a mixed playlist of music playing at all times, but mostly 80’s Italian disco, a small world of characters appeared – some dreamt, some connected to the places I love, some fond memories.
Tara Marynowsky August 2022
Tara Marynowsky’s painterly interventions on vintage postcards and subtly rendered watercolours explore the raw power of the feminine. She knows that nostalgia for a perfectly contained female energy exists alongside the historical transformation of women’s self-identity, and she looks to bring poetic truth to light. Her process-oriented sensibility balances emotive intensity with delicate line, form and colour, and imbues the fragile figures of men and women, animals, ghostly apparitions and masked players inhabiting her work with an otherworldly honesty – connecting a strangely familiar past with an unsettling present.
Provocative and direct, confronting and comforting, Marynowsky’s ability to enter the viewer into an intimate relationship with the fragility and beauty of curiosity, play and subverted politesse forces dialogue with the tropes we use to define ourselves. In her work, cultural stereotypes, mythical archetypes and unspoken longings meet up with the subconscious currents that influence our daily lives.
Tara Marynowsky holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts with Honours from UNSW, College of Fine Arts, Sydney and has exhibited widely throughout Australia as well as internationally. She has been the recipient of numerous grants, awards and residencies, most recently a Marten Bequest Scholarship and including the Linden Postcard Prize, the Fraser Studio Arts Residency at Queen Street Studios in Sydney, a finalist for the Helen Lemprière Travelling Arts Scholarship and an Australia Council Inter-Arts Grant. Carol Schwarzman
Image: True Love2022, watercolour on paper, 21 x 15 cm
