membership / artist member

Dawn Shorten

http://dawnshorten.org/
download cv here

Dawn Shorten was featured in Contemporary Art Society's ARTfutures 2007 held at Bloomberg SPACE, London.

Shorten's work is held in museum member New Art Gallery Walsall's Garman Ryan Permanent Collection.

The Cloud Series are painted in white gouache on translucent drafting film, and mounted over grey card, the limited palette reflecting the quality of sky with full cloud cover. Tonal values in the drawing are as significant as the ‘accidental’ marks made by paint and water on the page, the diminutive scale of the images emphasising the delicacy of the process.

Many of the paintings have been made through isolating and loosely transcribing elements from old master paintings. Constable and Ruisdael have been referred to a great deal, but images have also been derived from Durer, Teniers, Freidrich and Poussin. Dramatic skies were deployed by the Romantic landscape painters to set emotional temperature and create atmosphere. Storms represented chaos, darkness and ‘cosmic disorder’; a sunrise, new beginning and fresh hope - a symbolism open to both religious and political interpretation.

Other source material includes film stills, newspaper photographs, and illustrations from meteorology textbooks. Explosions also form part of the series.

http://www.sevenseven.org.uk/Artists_files/DawnShorten.htm

• ARTfutures 2007

  7th March — 12th March 2007
  Bloomberg Space 50 Finsbury Square London EC2A 1HD