Louise Balaam

Louise's work is inspired by an emotional response to the natural world, in particular to the quality of light, which is a vital part of the mood of the paintings. She draws in the landscape and then paints intuitively in the studio, so that the work both has a sense of place, and yet can also evoke memories and personal interpretations in the viewer. There is a sense of intimacy and intensity, and the idea of a glimpse into a remembered reality. Louise's paintings relate to the English landscape tradition – Constable’s oil sketches are an important influence.

Louise often works in oil on panel allowing her to scratch into the wet surface. Direct and gestural brushstrokes assert the materiality of the oil paint and of the painting’s surface. The meaning of the work emerges from the language of paint, which is allowed to be itself before it is a description of something. Louise is fascinated by the capacity of paint to express things which cannot be put into words: a mysterious process takes place whereby the marks of the brush work on a subtle level, setting up an emotional and poetic resonance.

"I collect information about the particular places in the landscape which have meaning for me by drawing in pencil, watercolour or oilstick. I don’t take photos – I don’t find they give me the right kind of information. My drawings are informed as much by the experience of being there, by weather, sounds, smells and the process of walking through the landscape as by what I can see. Back in my studio, I use the drawings to help focus my memory, but don’t work directly from them – I find it works better to put the source material aside and to paint intuitively, so that the painting becomes an entity in its own right which starts to make its own demands – in a sense, it begins to answer back."