Painting the Nameless / Sue Vesely | Sue Rosalind Vesely
Painting the Nameless / Sue Vesely
20 May - 07 June 2010
Statement for ‘Painting the Nameless’ 2010
I paint from memory. I do not use models or paint anything from life.
The memory of the way the world appears is in our heads, it is a language which connects us at a level much deeper than speech. These things exist only in the vision and they have no names. They are in your head and in mine and that is why this work may remind you of your dreams.
I borrow objects from the real world to construct a space. But these, although they are painted naturalistically, they are not painted from life, they are made from generic models of the objects that I have in my memory. Everything comes from the mind. The objects are recognisable because we all have a visual idea, a subconscious model of what things look like; which form a subconscious language connecting our experience. We do not have words for these ideas. They are nameless.
Words are always generic: the description of light on an object can never show the uniqueness of the event. You can say, "sunlight slanted across the wall" but that will not show exactly how it looked. Our visual experience is continuously specific and these specific experiences form models in the memory that are generic.
It is a language without words that connects us subconsciously. So in seeing my work there is often the experience of being reminded of something personal. Some people say that I have painted their dreams.
Sue Rosalind Vesely May 2010