about
My work has divided in two, or perhaps three now, since the two strands have produced a third which combines the other two - small landscapes painted on the spot and what I call 'still life'.
Most of the year, in my studio, I work from a huge collection of found objects - they are my vocabulary - and in the last few years I've built up a large series of paintings, many of them the same size and shape, which work together and separately. They allow me to paint abstract pictures about the relationships between the objects while also enjoying the objects themselves. They also sometimes, I feel, suggest a slightly surrealist narrative. The objects lie on the floor so the space in the paintings can be slightly ambiguous, and I can incorporate time, the time spent in the process of making a painting, by scrubbing out objects as I physically move them about or by adding them in as drawn possibilities. This also creates another dimension as the drawings are more indefinite and suggestive, and it moves the paictures further into abstraction/surrealism.
Putting two or more of these 'still lifes' together creates an extra dimension in another way too, like three-dimensional noughts and crosses, as the paintings relate, echo or work off each other. The paintings are small so I can build a whole wall - or walls - in this way.
Lately I've enjoyed combining some of my landscapes - generally vertically, so the landscape element becomes merely a memory, not too insistent - with painted and charcoal drawings of the objects. I feel they let the imagination wander more freely.
Georgina Allen
Introduction to exhibition at Piers Feetham Gallery, 2008
To be deft and apt, and as consequential as a vital witness statement, is an achievement. To be so while remaining unpushy and unobvious is a remarkable one.
William Feaver
Introduction to exhibition at Piers Feetham Gallery, 2011
In the melting pot of contemporary art practice, Georgina Allen has chosen to be a painter and a very painterly painter, at that. She uses the seductively expressive qualities of highly wrought paint surfaces, dabbed or dragged and scratched to capture fleeting effects of ever-moving air and water over earth, grass, rock; changing clouds and light in the sky and on the sea and shadows on the grass … She exploits a long tradition of painting quickly in the open air, but the apparent spontaneity of the rapid marks and arbitrary cutting-off is deceptive, concealing careful planning: each viewpoint is thoughtfully considered and placed within the formal balance of the composition … She uses recognisable things – stones, faded flowers, shells – to create abstractions and … she puts the onus of interpretation on the viewer. The uniform size and tone of the paintings emphasises the subtlety of choice and the precise placing of the elements.
Charlotte Gere
Introduction to exhibition at Piers Feetham Gallery, 2014
[These are] abstract paintings in which the focus of her eye is on the rhythms and shapes of the objects that she brings together and then paints with such a controlled, painterly touch. Arranged and painted with careful regard to the scale and proportion of the objects within each arrangement, what you can get is a greatly enlarged rendering of often quite small objects. The effect is not only to make you pay proper attention to what you are looking at but more importantly, and unexpectedly, to induce a sense of wonder and awe at the sheer incorrigible variousness of things.
Georgina Allen does something very similar in fact when it comes to her paintings of the Pembrokeshire coastline … in that it, again, becomes a kind of found, abstract landscape, looked at not for its picturesqueness but for the forms and shapes which it provides her work. Painted again on almost uniform-shaped boards – smallish and panoramic in shape in this case, because she considers that is very much the overriding geological ‘shape’ of this particular landscape.
Nicholas Usherwood, Features Editor, Galleries magazine
Introduction to exhibition at Piers Feetham Gallery, 2017
Art is ... is a process which can take one of two essential directions – an inward path in which abstract forms and colours become the markers of conscious and unconscious response, or a turning outward, to external visual stimuli – landscape, natural history or the figure for example – as metaphors for thoughts, feelings and ideas. And yet, while Georgina Allen's quiet and subtle landscape and still-life paintings may, quite obviously, seem to belong to the latter class, the more you look at them the more they begin to take on a distinctly inward, contemplative character also.
Nicholas Usherwood, Features Editor, Galleries magazine
Most of the year, in my studio, I work from a huge collection of found objects - they are my vocabulary - and in the last few years I've built up a large series of paintings, many of them the same size and shape, which work together and separately. They allow me to paint abstract pictures about the relationships between the objects while also enjoying the objects themselves. They also sometimes, I feel, suggest a slightly surrealist narrative. The objects lie on the floor so the space in the paintings can be slightly ambiguous, and I can incorporate time, the time spent in the process of making a painting, by scrubbing out objects as I physically move them about or by adding them in as drawn possibilities. This also creates another dimension as the drawings are more indefinite and suggestive, and it moves the paictures further into abstraction/surrealism.
Putting two or more of these 'still lifes' together creates an extra dimension in another way too, like three-dimensional noughts and crosses, as the paintings relate, echo or work off each other. The paintings are small so I can build a whole wall - or walls - in this way.
Lately I've enjoyed combining some of my landscapes - generally vertically, so the landscape element becomes merely a memory, not too insistent - with painted and charcoal drawings of the objects. I feel they let the imagination wander more freely.
Georgina Allen
Introduction to exhibition at Piers Feetham Gallery, 2008
To be deft and apt, and as consequential as a vital witness statement, is an achievement. To be so while remaining unpushy and unobvious is a remarkable one.
William Feaver
Introduction to exhibition at Piers Feetham Gallery, 2011
In the melting pot of contemporary art practice, Georgina Allen has chosen to be a painter and a very painterly painter, at that. She uses the seductively expressive qualities of highly wrought paint surfaces, dabbed or dragged and scratched to capture fleeting effects of ever-moving air and water over earth, grass, rock; changing clouds and light in the sky and on the sea and shadows on the grass … She exploits a long tradition of painting quickly in the open air, but the apparent spontaneity of the rapid marks and arbitrary cutting-off is deceptive, concealing careful planning: each viewpoint is thoughtfully considered and placed within the formal balance of the composition … She uses recognisable things – stones, faded flowers, shells – to create abstractions and … she puts the onus of interpretation on the viewer. The uniform size and tone of the paintings emphasises the subtlety of choice and the precise placing of the elements.
Charlotte Gere
Introduction to exhibition at Piers Feetham Gallery, 2014
[These are] abstract paintings in which the focus of her eye is on the rhythms and shapes of the objects that she brings together and then paints with such a controlled, painterly touch. Arranged and painted with careful regard to the scale and proportion of the objects within each arrangement, what you can get is a greatly enlarged rendering of often quite small objects. The effect is not only to make you pay proper attention to what you are looking at but more importantly, and unexpectedly, to induce a sense of wonder and awe at the sheer incorrigible variousness of things.
Georgina Allen does something very similar in fact when it comes to her paintings of the Pembrokeshire coastline … in that it, again, becomes a kind of found, abstract landscape, looked at not for its picturesqueness but for the forms and shapes which it provides her work. Painted again on almost uniform-shaped boards – smallish and panoramic in shape in this case, because she considers that is very much the overriding geological ‘shape’ of this particular landscape.
Nicholas Usherwood, Features Editor, Galleries magazine
Introduction to exhibition at Piers Feetham Gallery, 2017
Art is ... is a process which can take one of two essential directions – an inward path in which abstract forms and colours become the markers of conscious and unconscious response, or a turning outward, to external visual stimuli – landscape, natural history or the figure for example – as metaphors for thoughts, feelings and ideas. And yet, while Georgina Allen's quiet and subtle landscape and still-life paintings may, quite obviously, seem to belong to the latter class, the more you look at them the more they begin to take on a distinctly inward, contemplative character also.
Nicholas Usherwood, Features Editor, Galleries magazine
