The Shape of Light

The power of colour and the way it can transform a mood or induce a feeling of calm and happiness is at the heart of my work as I explore the transcendental and the metaphysical worlds through colour and imagination. A moment of serendipity appears, like magic, when a shaft of sunlight falls across a wall, only to disappear moments later. These instants are the subjects of my paintings and are portrayed as physical light from a window or light source, and shadows cast by the sun falling across their surface. I love the process of balancing the thinnest of glazes of pure colour with opaque layers, using white as a structural tool so that it is never solid but allows glimpses of the colour just beneath, creating passages of colour that seem to recede into the surface of the painting.

I draw my inspiration from spaces and rooms familiar to me. Architectural details and fragmented shapes are mingled together so that history and memory play their part and paintings become reflections on time and space.

Hermione’s multi-layered paintings are hard to define. They move in and out of the figurative, as if through a lens that sharpens or blurs, just as memory itself. But there is an ambiguity within the work which is the paradox of transience preserved.

Jackie Naffah