The Paper Collage Studies represent a new direction in Hannah Ludnow's practice — the abstract seascape sensibility of her paintings translated into a different medium, the painted marks replaced by...
The Paper Collage Studies represent a new direction in Hannah Ludnow's practice — the abstract seascape sensibility of her paintings translated into a different medium, the painted marks replaced by placed paper, the colour choices constrained by the papers themselves. Overlapping rectangular forms in beige, cream and black build a composition that carries the same quality of calm and considered arrangement that her Deconstruction screen prints approach from the screen printing side.
Ludnow's paintings have always worked by abstraction — reducing the Cornish landscape to its essential light, form and atmosphere rather than depicting specific places. The Paper Collage Studies take that reduction further: no paint, no brush mark, just the edge of one piece of paper against another, and the colour of the paper itself as the palette. Original, one-of-a-kind, displayed in a white frame, ready to hang. Signed. £350.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Hannah Ludnow
I grew up by the coast in Cornwall and spent my informative years in the South West of England. The amazing light, the huge and ever changing skies and beautiful dramatic coastlines, became etched into memory. I became influenced by the abstract expressionists Peter Lanyon, Patrick Heron and Ben Nicholson, whose work draws directly from experiences of a dramatic or calmness in nature and landscape. More recently I have found myself looking at the work of Turner with his amazing sense of light. I’m inspired by the patterns nature creates – the force of the elements against the landscape, and the art it creates by itself with erosion and decomposition against rock, sands, and man made objects.
My work is never an actual place, as I paint entirely from memory never from photo’s or en plain air. Instead I start with remembering a moment, and how that moment felt, the effect that being in the landscape has on you. I hope to build an atmosphere in a painting which draws you in and allows you to imagine yourself there, stood on a cliff, a beach or behind the dunes, exposed to the elements and the unpredictability of nature. I strive to capture a feel and a recollection of somewhere the viewer knows or remembers wherever in the world this may be. My paintings are primarily about the light and the feelings a place can evoke in the viewer, the emotions that a memory of a place and time can stir within. A memory of thoughts and feelings within a landscape, often a special and private moment, where the vastness and beauty of the landscape around you brings a sense of perspective, clarity and calm .
Ludnow graduated with a BA in Art from the University of Surrey in 1999 and set up Columbia Road Gallery in 2015, where she exhibits her work alongside a select group of other artists. Her paintings are held in private collections in London, Cornwall and the Middle East. Her Print Club London catalogue includes the Deconstruction screen print series — deconstructed elements of her larger paintings in a muted palette on 270gsm Velum White — and the newer Paper Collage Studies, which explore the same compositional thinking through placed paper forms.
