Diane Farris Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new paintings by Judith Currelly.

Judith spends her summers as a bush pilot in Northern Canada and her winters painting in Victoria and the Gulf Islands of BC. Her paintings are worked on mahogany door skin, as she believes that her paintings are meant to be touched. She employs various tactile techniques such as scraping, scoring, beveling, and staining the surface of the wood to imply geological forms. The haunting images of man and animal's co-existence in the North evoke feelings of primitive mysticism.

Vast, sweeping visions of the northern landscape as seen from her pilot's perspective have been the hallmark of Judith's paintings. Often the work looks abstracted and stylized until the viewer sees her arial photographs and realizes that the rendering is quite true to the bird's eye viewer. Several of these photographs will be available for viewing as well as video documentation of her life in the north.

In this new body of work, Currelly has incorporated wood block and lino print techniques into the paintings. She has used etching and scraping to reflect the permanence of mark making (as with petroglyphs, pictographs, fossils). 'Prints and Imprints' refer to both the method of painting and the subject. The artist states, "The focus of the work is an amalgamation of experiences, places, and memories imprinted on my psyche from many years living, working, and flying in the North".

Print: a mark made by pressure; to impress something.

Imprint: to fix indelibly or permanently (as in memory); a mark or depression made by pressure; an indelible, distinguishing effect or influence.