Art Matters

BY ENZO MARRA

Daniella Norton is an artist based in Brighton, who has been involved in exhibitions locally and nationally and has been selected for the Creekside Open and the Beep Painting Biennial in recent years.

Her paintings have a hard-fought voice and presence that can threaten to transcend the subject matter. Her textural prowess bringing surfaces to life, the image being the first thing that greets you, but the process of it becoming that image always leaves a greater felt effect.

Having been referred to as lawless, her paintings are without parameters, or at least without parameters that control or bind what then happens. Their small surfaces allowing them to be seen wholly from a close distance, an intimate and almost personal encounter housed within them waiting to be triggered.

She finds pleasure in responding to the paint she puts down, returning each day and trying something that will let it build and evolve, rather than knowing in advance what it is, allowing her to challenge and change her approach to using the external visual information that currently inspires. Only willing to attempt to paint in accordance with what she feels she can paint on a given day, rather than what is on the easel waiting to be worked on.

Having started working on a series of paintings which all stem from a drawing of an object from memory, she is allowing the paint they are composed of to increasingly become abstract, becoming something else which lingers between forms and non-forms. This enjoyment, which can be seen in her work when she isn’t trying to paint like an artist, reveals a rebellious part in her that wishes to paint awkwardly, as if she didn’t yet know anything about painting.

Striving to try to find a balance in the grey area between her interest in awkwardness and the concept of finding herself gradually involved in a more consistent approach. The conversation between her and the activity that occurs over the support, allowing an honest image to rise out of the activity. Something real and not merely gestural, everything that remains meant to still be there.

The themes she follows, she feels compelled to explore more deeply, can be linked to her interest in power relationships, whether it may be seen within the political realm to the lived lives of individuals and between the human presence and the nature they could be surrounded by if they were fortunate. Her constant battling dichotomy between narrative, figurative and wanting to just have paint and the surface textures that can be achieved.

The pull between the physical use of paint and the image conveyed, a constant to and fro. In her heart, she feels that paintings can be seen at their most pure when they are nonfigurative, but she also loves the ways in which an image of a specific something can communicate with a real felt immediacy, functioning in a different way than the achieved surface of a more abstract painting.