Fleur Kreel

Artistic background

I paint at home from memory, from field sketches of landscapes, rapidly moving scenes, people doing what they do, animals, from still life. I've not had art education or training. I've always loved paint, pencil and writing on walls – which got me into trouble at a very early age. For much of my life my painting has been of the DIY home decorating kind. I first started painting paintings in 2012. Since then, although I've had many interruptions, I’m continually impassioned to try to express my feelings in paint about what I see. Light on my kitchen table through a glass vase. A simple white jug. A tulip in all its stages from bud to a dead, fragile, tissue paper-like curl. A clean curved edge of chalk hill. A force of steeply rising field, folds and furrows. An elusive roundness on a round earth in a bowl of sky. Convex? Concave? How do I depict it? How is it framed other than by my eye? An elusive, sensational green. The shapes of huddled sheep, the way a calf looks at one. Clarity of tree and hedge, silhouette and shadow. A strange perspective, an optical illusion of slope so near yet so far. Coupled with a deep feeling of how beauty is threatened by destruction. There is so much beauty in our world, I can’t choose one subject.
The challenge of depiction, expression, will keep me trying for the rest of my life.