Photographs
Varanasi, India, January 2024
An artist's residency at the Swiss artist and indologist, Alice Boner's former home on the banks of the Ganges, Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India.
Every street corner gratuitively offers the most wonderful things, shapes, forms, types, movements,colours and light; a superabundance that cannot be grasped.
Alice Boner Diaries, India 1934-1967
In the market I buy some of the pigments- kumkum and sindoor -vermillion, rose pinks, oranges and yellows from turmeric and saffron.I begin some small paintings but the stallholder has already warned me they need mixing with gum- unfixed they return to powder- the left behind chance traces are the most interesting.
The light through the fogs is a silver grey haze.No sharp outlines with contrasting shadow like the Italian light that I know. Land, sky and the Ganga River are strokes of different warm and cool whites, greys and pale naples yellows. Everything bleeds into a sfumato glaze.
Intense saturated colours and the pale tints of the river’s light.Two different series of paintings in the studiio.
Sharon Hall
2024
Colour in Place (Colore nei Luoghi) excerpt from catalogue essay
In Hall’s photographs of Italian architecture [..]: the photographs of the derelict limonaia at Villa Reale, Lucca or the Roman Mannerist frescoes in the Villa Giulia, Rome – both of these dwell on the subtle undermining of perfect symmetry. In the Villa Reale it is the counterpoint between the facing of architectural symmetries and the vagaries of desolation and nature taking its toll. The Roman frescoes show quasi-tapestry designs with their doubled symmetry only undermined by the uneven patina and discoloration here and there. We might also note the geometric patterns on the borders of these frescoes – with their sense of flatness and yet implied illusion – something that informs Hall’s choice of geometries in her own work.
David Ryan
2013