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The main focus of my work is non-figurative drawing. Here, some thoughts on the subject:
I draw no ”thing” – I trace energy, explore space, record sensation. My interest is primarily in non-figurative drawing, in pure mark-making, in creating work that eludes the tyranny of logic and language. Drawing as exploration; a journey, destination unknown.
Working in a variety of sizes from the intimate to the expansive with all possible materials from charcoal to oilsticks, my drawings develop in continued response to marks made. Sometimes spare and full of light, often dense and multi-layered, the resulting drawings are witness to the process itself.
”A drawing is not a thing but an act.” (Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing, Vintage Books, a division of Random Housee, 1973).
Emptiness, the void, visual silence… chaos as matrix of creativity… energy of the female form, of flowers – these are the main themes of my work.
Predominantly non-figurative, often large-scale and/or multi-panelled, in series and site-specific when possible.
Born in Switzerland, raised in Montreal, Canada, resided variously in Toronto and Vancouver, as well as England. Germany and Cyprus. Background in ballet, makeup artistry and photography. Painting since 1990, Currently a full-time visual artist living and working in Lucerne, Switzerland.
2009 – 2010: Post Graduate Diploma in Fine Arts, Cyprus College of Art (UK Accreditation)
2007 – 2008: St.Ives School of Painting, St.Ives, Cornwall UK
Oct 2015 – Apr 2016: Estudio Nomada, Barcelona
Jul 2015 – Sep 2015: Verrocchio Arts Centre, Tuscany
Sep 2010 – Oct 2010: Ctrllab Gallery, Montreal
Feb 2009 – Aug 2009: Cyprus College of Art, Cyprus
Oct 2008 – Jan 2009: CAMAC Centre d’arts Marnay Arts Center, Paris FR
Solo Shows
2019: Foyer Quartieftreff Zollikon, Zürich CH
2017: Enge Open Studio, Zürich CH
2016: Estudio Nomada Gallery, Barcelona Spain
2015: Helen Feiler Gallery, Newlyn, Cornwall UK
2014: New Street Gallery, Penzance, Cornwall UK
2012: Visual Voice Gallery, Montreal
2011: Ctrllab Gallery, Montreal
2010: Ctrllab Gallery, Montreal
2008: Open Studio, CAMAC, Paris FR
2007: St.Ives Bay Gallery, St.Ives, Cornwall UK
2007: Finanzdept Gallery, Luzern CH
2005: Blutspendezentrum, Luzern CH
2005: Landgasthaus Menzberg, Luzern CH
2004: Blutspendezentrum, Luzern CH
2003: Furttalstrasse Open Studio, Zürich CH
2000: Atelier Im Moor, Bremen D
1999: Bel-Art Gallery, Vancouver
1999: Women’s Health Centre, Vancouver
1998: The Velvet Café, Vancouver
1998: Melriche’s on Davie, Vancouver
1997: Basic Inquiry Gallery, Vancouver
1995: Quadrart Coiffeur Gallery, Zürich CH
Selected Group Shows
2018: boesner CH 25th anniversary competition
2015: Verrocchio Arts Centre, Tuscany IT
2010: The Gallery at Lempa CY
2010: Guildhouse Gallery, Larnaca CY
2009: Guildhouse Gallery, Larnaca CY
2007: Sloop Inn Christmas Show, St.Ives UK
2006: Art Mode Gallery, Ottawa & Calgary
2001: Tib Lane Gallery, Manchester UK
1998: Bel Art Gallery, Vancouver
1997: Basic Inquiry Gallery, Vancouver
Ken Hay on the work of Alannah Krutina
“we are in the midst of wonder, responding with joy”
(Agnes Martin, 1975)
There are at least three types of work present in the current exhibition. Works which owe their inspiration to a specific location, light or situation, which is broader and perhaps more general than the parameters suggested by the term ‘landscape’; Works which take as their inspiration the human form, often the nude female form, and which pay homage to this through a number of subtle permutations of figure and ground, like a theme and variations; and works whose inspiration may be either of the two preceding categories, but whose final form is determined by an internal procedure, more intuitive than logical, whereby the process of making marks and responding to the marks already deposited on the surface of the painting, enables a dialogue, or interactive relation, first between the painter and the canvas, and then between the canvas and the viewer.
In the first type of work, the paint is offered to the canvas in a series of sweeping gestural swirls, often reflecting a full arm-motion as in Action-Painting. The paint is luminous and translucent, thin veils of acrylic looped and curled in stringy shimmers of light and slightly less light pigment. The lushness of vegetation and of sunlight is suggested in these rainbow strings, and the brightness of the canvas is allowed to shine through, Fauve-style, to suggest the intensity of sunlight, and enhance contrast.
In the second series of work, amphorae or Venus-figures erupt onto the canvas speedily and with frenetic gesture. Often, these are two or three coloured – a sombre background tone overlaid by a calligraphic delineation of the form. The fullness of the body, its curves and volumes, are captured quickly with an unhesitating directness and left to sit on the background tone. These are not just drawings, though: the colour and tone of the fore- and background are indivisibly united, so that the background colour, caught within the swirls of the figuration, becomes the foreground volume as well. This is no mean feat, and it is only the surety and immediacy of the gesture, which secures their success as forms. Worked on too long, they might just disappear.
In the third, and latest series of canvases, works, which started out as loosely figurative references to landscape and light, the landscape of the Lemba valley in Cyprus, have overtaken their inspiration and entered into a new type of theatrical dialogue with the painter and eventually, with us, the viewers. Here the multiple overlayering of pigment and gesture has been pushed, beyond the figurative reference, beyond the figure, almost into nothingness. But not quite. As in twilight, before our retinas cease to register the final shades of night, a shimmering blue-black space confronts us. This is not the black space of Ad Reinhardt, Rodchenko and Malevich, although it may have some connection to the blackness of Rothko’s ‘Chapel’ works, or yet the shimmering whiteness of Ryman or Cy Twombly, but something more akin to a ‘darkened’ late Monet or the barely distinguishable tones of a Vuillard interior. The darkness is never so complete as to obliterate the traces of the filigree brushstrokes, trailing over the surface. It is a darkness which is still, just, light – alluding to a deeper level of experience which Melanie Klein would have called ‘oceanic’. A space into which we might float, supported in immensity, and in which the world and all its detail and complexity, is dissolved or suspended.
These paintings occupy a space in the Romantic tradition which stretches from Caspar David Friedrich to Rothko, as Harold Rosenberg has outlined – They place the viewer, as human, perhaps isolated, individual in front of the immensity of the Sublime – (nature/god) responding in awe and wonderment. It is a relation in which both painter and viewer interact with the artwork in a quasi-theatrical way. The ‘meaning’ of the picture does not lie in any specific brushstroke or gesture, but rather in the physicality of the relationship to space and light, which operates between the maker and receiver of the gestures, which constitute the artwork. It is a tradition which the Minimalist like Don Judd and Sol Lewit tried to replace or subvert with the purity of their Platonic forms, but which nonetheless remains alive in the work of their fellow minimalist, Agnes Martin, whose subtlety speaks volumes yet. Alannah’s work explores such a liminal zone.
Kenneth G. Hay, Lemba, 25 April, 2010
(Kenneth G. Hay BA, MA, PhD, FRSA is Professor of Contemporary Art Practice and Deputy Head of the Department of Art and Design at Leeds University, UK)
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