THE NAMBUCCA Valley Arts Council’s Stringer ‘Artist of the Month’ for January 2018 is Celia Ramsay.
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Celia usually paints in her preferred medium of watercolour but this year has been experimenting with spray painting. “I saw this being done on television with cans of spray paint using a few sticks and leaves to make shapes and thought ‘I must have a go at that’.”
Celia’s first two paintings were of forests with leaves, twigs, grasses and anything else she could find being used to make shapes. They turned out to be a lot more complicated than the painting she had seen on television with multi-layers of colours being used and sometimes the shapes being positive and sometimes negative to allow them to be darker or lighter than the surrounding colour.
“I found that using gold and silver paint as well as other colours could add interest and drama,” she said.
Celia went on to experiment with other subjects such as the sea, outer space, silhouettes of figures with umbrellas and her favourite flower subjects - red poppies and sunflowers.
Celia has called her exhibition Is it Graffiti? because this is the first question many people ask when she tells them what she has been doing. Of course it is not graffiti because she is not going around town painting on walls but rather uses canvas or board.
A morning tea will be held on Wednesday January 3 from 10 o’clock in the Stringer Gallery in the Nambucca Community and Arts Building to launch Celia’s exhibition. Everyone welcome.