Caroline Kennedy - 'Blue Note'

Wednesday 27 February - Sunday 24 March 2019

These snapshots are glimpsed through portals, doorways and windows – from a moving car, a hotel, a train or a plane, the views are fleeting.

Intimate fragments of time. The perspective is often wide, elevated and viewed from a position that maps the terrain from some distance. Foreign landscapes and familiar places are connected through the colour blue. This connectivity between place and space is as relevant to contemporary urban vistas as to traditional landscapes.

Flashes of blue within the vistas - road markings, a façade of a building, sky or sea - captured Kennedy’s attention - and collecting like a bower bird, she foraged for ideas to pinpoint the focus of the composition. Using a monochromatic saturation of blue throughout the series enhances the work’s tonal values; patterns, mass and lines become clearer and more pronounced. It is both the repetition and the differences in the various patterns of landscapes that intrigue her.

The paintings range from old cities to new, and delineate the architecture of structures in a landscape that is devoid of human presence. The almost dreamlike imagery conveys the essence of memory and its ethereal qualities.

This blue collection notes the beauty of nature and the built environment as a sensorial, visual, reductive bite of colour. This body of work is a diaristic, contemplative travel journal, drawn from the artist’s recent time in Morocco, Spain, Greece alongside her affection for Melbourne and Sydney.