Painting Dementia
ARTIST ‘PAINTING DEMENTIA’ OFFERED FIRST EVER SOLO EXHIBITION FIFTY YEARS AFTER SHE WENT TO ART SCHOOL
EVEN as a teenager in the 1960s, Elizabeth Ann Ogilvie was a precociously talented artist. She won a prestigious art competition organised by the Edinburgh Festival aged just 14 and a couple of years later was invited to paint a full-scale mural for a church in Edinburgh close to where she grew up.
But despite attending Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design in Dundee twice; first to study painting, and years later to take a degree in Environmental Interior Design, her career as an artist was a stop-start affair.
Now in her 60s, having raised a family and run her own interior design business, the Tillicoultry-based painter is having her first ever solo exhibition at The Green Gallery, Dollar.
The exhibition opens in the Clackmanannanshire town on Friday 4th November and ends on Sunday 27th November.
Elizabeth’s semi-abstract paintings present her highly-personal interpretation of how an individual suffering from dementia feels when afflicted by this devastating condition. She was inspired to paint this way after watching the gradual decline of her grandfather, who suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease.
The exhibition came about after Elizabeth went in check out the new Green Gallery in Dollar a few months ago and got chatting to owner, Becky Walker.
Becky, who also runs a sister Green Gallery in Buchlyvie, explains: “Over the years I’ve got used to people coming in to the gallery and telling me they went to art school and do a bit of painting. These conversations usually end up with me explaining tactfully that I am not looking to show any more artists’ work. But there was something about Elizabeth and her work.
“She told me she’d gone to art school in Dundee and then had a family, run her own interior design business and travelled a bit, absorbing art everywhere she went. Then she also said she’d been an assistant and worked with renowned Scottish pop art pioneer, Eduardo Paolozzi in London until his death in 2005.
“Paolozzi had been something of a mentor to her, she told me, and influenced the way she painted now.
“Elizabeth asked if I’d have a look at her work and I was intrigued so I went to her house and I could see immediately that she had something quite special. Her work is quite abstract but the layers she creates draw you in completely.
“I offered her a solo show in the gallery because I knew that other people would love it.”
According to Elizabeth, who has two grown-up sons, she never knows what kind of image she will end up with when she starts the process of painting.
“I never know whether it will be figurative,landscape or semi-abstract at the start of the procedure. It’s all like putting together a puzzle of remembered images; slightly distorted and fragmented through time and memory. Just as a person suffering from dementia tries to grasp for remembered fragments to paint a verbal picture.
“It used to take my grandfather half an hour to remember who I was. This idea that a picture is a collection of fragments waiting to come together has fed into all my work. For me, it is all about the process of fitting fragments together.
“There is a great freedom in painting this way. I love nature but I don’t want to paint a flower. Nature has its own beauty so that’s why i leave it be and I paint in my own way.
“I start with a blank canvas and apply mixed media such as acrylic, household paint, ink, and then collage to the canvas randomly. This method is entirely involuntary and often goes through several transitions before finally the conscious mind takes over and an image appears to resolve the conflict.
“After a very conventional training at art school all these years ago I have developed a love of abstract art inspired by memory and compositional surprise.”
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