INSPIRATION
Ophelia's ideas are drawn form many sources. First, the personalities of her subjects. These might be people she meets and remembers, those she reads or hears about, others she glimpses on the street, and those who await their exodus from her mind's eye. They have pasts, imperfections, conceits, predictable and unpredictable behaviour.
There is Shakespeare, whose plays she plunders for ideas ranging from strongly visual comedy to the more intimate and meaningful of human concerns. She deliberately takes quotations out of context as titles for her works and, playing on their possibilities, gives them the 21st century treatment, or strings them along a more surreal route to where abstract ideas can be explored.
Then there are the sketches of Peter Cook and Dudley Moore whose satires, observations and use of all aspects of the arts intrigue her. Their parody of Greta Garbo's struggle with fame, summed up in a sketch of "Bargo" strutting the streets, blaring through a megaphone "I vant to be alone" will be the starting point of a series of new paintings bearing that title.
On a painterly level, the works of Modigliani, Stanley Spencer, Toulouse-Lautrec, Anne Redpath, Michael Sowa, Fernando Botero, Degas, Brueghel, the portraits of Holbein and Dutch painters such as Vermeer and Van Eyck have all sparked off her fascination with people and their surroundings. Her love of intense colour was initially derived from childhood visits to the Fitzwilliam Museum which hosts a fine collection of works by the early Renaissance Florentine painters, and by Samuel Palmer, a favourite of hers.
And there are her travels in Italy, France, and Spain, which fuel her constant appetite for colour.
Works by artists Ophelia knows and admires include:
Paintings by Rebecca Merry at www.rebeccamerry.co.uk
Prints and paintings by Jim Anderson at www.jimpanzee.co.uk
Paintings by Claerwen James at www.flowerseast.com and www.clivejames.com
Prints by Amanda Lebus at www.amandalebus.com
Drawings, portraits and paintings by Peter Mennim at www.petermennim.com
Paintings and drawings by Pierre Clement at www.clement-interiors.co.uk
Sculptures by Roger Phillippo at www.phillippoceramics.co.uk
Ceramics by Sue Tutton at www.anglianpotters.org.uk
© Ophelia Redpath