ARTIST STATEMENT, BIOGRAPHY AND EXHIBITION HIGHLIGHTS Ferha's paintings attempt to depict the drama of the urban street. Some pieces are compositions based on observations of everyday life. Other works comprise ‘portraits' of lost places and human stories observed on the streets of Newham, in East London. Her work takes inspiration from the lived realities of people in contemporary society and attempts to chronicle the changing environment of this part of East London where she has lived since the early 1970s. One of the drivers of her work has been noticing how time is found in the environment in buildings and fragments of the detritus of earlier generations. As she composes her paintings in the series 'disappeared landmarks', she discovers the signs and remains of edifices, objects and people from the past and animates her works with ghostly shadows of these vanished places and people. The luminous blues in her work have come to represent absent things that she has rediscovered in her research and then placed back into the environment. The blue edifices she paints are shadows of missing buildings (churches, pubs, libraries). The blue figures are former inhabitants who once walked the same streets and now appear to mingle amongst the present-day population. In these ‘timescapes’ Ferha is attempting to evoke a perception in the viewer of the continuous transformation of the urban landscape and its links with the past. Ferha’s paintings are inspired by the realism of the artists of the Northern Renaissance and is predominately characterised by an intentional technique using drawing between layers of transparent glaze to explore depth, contour, colour, and perspective. Her observational approach allows her to capture the way colours fade towards the horizon, contours of shapes dissipate with distance, and the use of perspective to influence depth. Many of the works deliberately avoid flat perspective to embrace aerial views of urban landscapes, which show individuals or small groups viewed from a high vantage point and engaged in their own distinct activity and aim to capture the drama of everyday contemporary urban life. BIOGRAPHY TRAINING: Winchester School of Art - 1979-82. CO-FOUNDER: URBAN CONTEMPORARIES GROUP - a group of painters with a shared interest in capturing the urban experience. https://urbancontemporaries.weebly.com urbancontemporaries.weebly.com COMMISSIONS: CITY OF LONDON CORPORATION CULTURE AND COMMERCE TASKFORCE 2021. https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/things-to-do/tourism-trends-and-strategies/cultural-strategy/culture-and-commerce-taskforce/culture-and-commerce-fuelling-creative-renewal COLLECTIONS & WHERE TO SEE THE WORKS:
|