Christine Allman

Norfolk has always been my home county. I studied art at the NSAD. I maintain my profile as an exhibiting artist both in solo and group exhibitions with work in private collections and completed commissions.
I have curatorial and arts management experience. I also advise students on their art practice both as individuals and within small groups.

I work with two main mediums, egg tempera, my current and preferred medium and oil glazes with its qualities of subtle transparent layering of colour, offering a sense of emanating light from within the painting.
Inspirational to my earlier work was the late English metaphysical painter Cecil Collins through his use of oil glazes and spiritually charged landscapes and figures.

Drawing is a valuable entry point to my painting which begins with photographs, sketches and observational drawings a means of recording visual information and developing ideas before committing to paint.
I enjoy the particular demands of working with egg tempera, it compliments and underpins my current practice, achieving an ‘other worldly’ quality to working with landscape. It is a time consuming, meditative, exacting, process.
A layering of transparent or opaque, finely detailed, delicate but expressive mark making, layers of colour over and against another, one shape in relation to another.

The challenge is to create light, shadow, form and texture, absorbing and transforming visual clues from the physical world and reflecting them back to the viewer through landscape to offer a sense of other.
The final image is very rarely clear to me at the onset. It begins with a spark of intuitive inspiration, an inner recognition of something from a visual experience, a place, objects, buildings, figures, textures or colours. I collect and consider memories, visual patterns, forms, colour, texture and emotion, a journey, guided by a silent inner intuition trusting that, through the painting process, a final image will come to fruition.

Current influences are, British artists Eric Ravilious, John Nash, British Ruralists members, Anne Ovenden and David Inshaw.
Artists working in egg tempera, Americans Andrew Wyeth, George Tooker, Robert Vickrey.
British contemporary artists, James Lynch and Anna Sweeten and the late Irish painter Fergus Ryan
In conclusion, in the words of Fergus Ryan:
‘I think my primary emotion is a sort of solitude in timelessness, an experience of time suspended for a measurable moment, a glimpse of the ‘presence of absence’.
‘But the ancient landscape is far from empty, it is everywhere filled with ‘the presence of absence’.

Christine's Website: www.christineallman.com