Roanne O'Donnell Fife, United Kingdom

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O’Donnell is an award winning Scottish painter currently working on the series SURFACE WORK. After obtaining an MA in Contemporary European Fine Art in Barcelona, she spent 18 years of professional practice in Norway and now lives in Andalucia and Fife. The subject of her work is the process of making it, inextricably linked to the concepts and actions of limitation, restriction and repetition.

The subject of my work is the process of making it, limitation, restriction, repetition. Restricting my materials, and with a strict mark-making action, I deliberately control the painfully slow progression of the surfaces. It is a twenty two year investigation.

The mark is a horizontal line. The substrate is paper. Binders are limited to oil and cold wax. Materials are restricted to ivory black pigment, graphite and charcoal. The physical process is the monotonous repetitive movement of making lines by bending over paper, laid flat, and drawing the line or moving my paint mixtures across the surface over and over, again and again. The concept is gemination: ”No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” Heraclitus of Ephesus.

My studio practice is mechanical. My process is calculated. I work on one layer in one sitting, irrespective of scale, as a surface tells the whole story of its making and if I stop it shows. So many factors dictate the result of the painting that to rest for more than a short length of time breaks continuity and the image is split into however many parts I stopped for. Factors such as how the paint is mixed and the rhythm of my gesture, the speed of my movement; with aggression or gently, heavy or light pressure. The work is formed by way of how I stand, my rhythm, the tempo, the angles of my arm, how my hand grips the brush or utensil; if I flick, stroke, cut or push.

During the making, I have an immediate aesthetic response to each mark or series of marks and take only seconds in deciding to keep or re-make. I look at form, impasto fat or translucent lean. This response is as basic as a like or dislike for the marks’ value and its relationship to those made before and beside. If I make a mark I’m unhappy with I scrape it away and re-make it. When I work my face can be as close as a few centimetres from the surface, observing and absorbing each mark as it is made, lifting my eyes to enjoy the emptiness in front or re-assess the marks behind.I invite the viewer to find nuances and explore, as I explore, the sameness and, in my eye, huge differences which unrelentingly have driven me for so long.