Bridget Bidwill is currently exhibiting alongside Andree de Latour in a show called Reflection and Image.
It’s a fitting title for a series of paintings that have an aura of calm – as much because of their pared down colours and organic shapes, as the time-consuming process of making. Looking closely, you can see that Bridget has spent many hours working and reworking the surface - scratching, sanding, painting and glazing to arrive at an end point that, she says, is still mysterious after decades of painting.
“One of my primary aims is to use the medium of painting to evoke feeling and thought,” she says. “Just as instrumental and classical music needs no lyrics to create its atmosphere and meaning, an abstract painting does not need to copy reality to prove its intellectual and aesthetic work.”
She describes the simplified abstract shapes that have become distinctively hers over the past 28 years of exhibiting as “an alphabet that I keep using ….. there are still a lot more possibilities.”
Recalling vessels, leaf and plant forms, she says they may have come about due to the influence by British modernist painters such as Ben Nicholson, Victor Pasmore, William Scott, and the St Ives Group, introduced to her by an art teacher at Woodford House where she boarded as a secondary school student.
There are also echoes of objects she grew up from her uncle’s shop in Wellington – pottery by Lucie Rie and Bernard Leach.
Bridget was born in Featherston, and went to primary school in Wairarapa before going to Woodford House in Haveloch North.
“My art teacher at Woodford, Miss Bowden, encouraged me to do the Fine Arts preliminary exam, which no one from the school had done for many years.”
At Ilam, her most important influence was New Zealand painter Don Peebles. “He had a very similar style of painting to the British Modernist painters and he was a great teacher. He worked with us, painting his own works in the corridor. He really helped us to think outside the square.”
Bridget followed her studies with three years of travelling in Europe and India. “The light and the colours in Italy in particular have been an influence,” she says.
“As an artist I am not telling a specific story, but hope to allow the changing world in which we live to become part of the focus behind my work. Many hours painting in the studio, with the radio on, allow me to learn so much about what is happening in the world and in particular, issues of climate change.
She says the darker colours and charcoal can represent the increasing carbon in our atmosphere and in our oceans, and the leaf and plant motifs “become symbols for natural things that consume that carbon dioxide and produce the oxygen we all survive on. The dark reds and rich colours add bursts of positivity and warmth, as well as representing the beauty of nature and a brighter future.”
Bridget has exhibited throughout New Zealand and her works are held in numerous private and public collections.
Currently showing at Aratoi: Reflection and Image: Recent works by Bridget Bidwill and Andrée de Latour, until 23 Feb; Close to Home: William Beetham Portraits, until 23 Feb; Apocalypse Now: Anthony Davies; until 23 Feb; Friends of Aratoi Art Awards 2013, until 3 February; Vincent Ward Breath - the fleeting intensity of life, until 28 Feb 2014.
