Best in Show

New paintings by Claire van der Plas

Artist’s Statement.

Best in Show continues and enlarges on the theme of my 2005 works for the exhibition Cropped.  Starting with a love of A&P shows and a long standing, if unrealistic, desire to try country life I have painted oddball fragments of rural utopias.

These carefully rendered oil paintings combine images of people, animals and vegetables taken at A&P shows over the last three summers, with landscapes by Stubbs, Fragonard, Constable, Landseer and others. The resulting mix is a sometimes uneasy dreamscape of country life.

As with dreams – both sleeping and waking – the stories and images can take on a life of their own in the drawing process. Using my computer as my primary drawing tool I combine different characters and backgrounds until an image coalesces that seems to tell part of a story. Quite what the story is remains open with the viewer free to take it in their own direction.

Real and unreal are intertwined in these paintings. The realism of the carefully rendered details is countered by the strangeness of the combinations and juxtapositions. The homey ordinariness of the objects the scenes are painted on adds a thread of ‘realness’ to the weave, their shapes often helping in the choosing of image combinations. Meanwhile the landscape settings are many steps removed from reality – scanned from books these images from other countries and other times are cropped and depopulated to serve as backdrops for new dramas.

I find this daydream mix of real and unreal enjoyable and have amplified this effect in this years’ work.