TRUE LOVE TRAVELS ON A GRAVEL ROAD

By likemindblog

SULA for blog

SULA CHANCE: born in Trinidad and, while she has lived in England for many years, her art is all about the colours of the Caribbean.  She can be moved and inspired by the colours in other artist’s work and will not hear a bad word about Matisse, or her heroes Howard Hodgkin and Mark Rothko.

Thank you so much Sula, for accepting to be part of this project and answering the following questions:

1)  What is art to and for you?

1.  My art tries to reflect my childhood experiences in the Caribbean, through the bright colours of the region.  Everything comes back to colour and the way it affects my emotions.  My favourite artists, Matisse, Hodgkin and Rothko, affect me in this way.

2)  What inspires you?                                                                               RedandGreen

I paint Caribbean seascapes, landscapes, Carnival subjects, animals and sea life.  Almost anything can spark me off – an advertisement for a cruise, a TV wildlife program, or the experience of someone else’s art for the first time.  Each piece is a journey which begins with that impetus and becomes an idea for the subject, which I then struggle to express.

3) When you are painting, creating, where does it take you, where does your mind travel?

3. I left off my animal paintings because once I’d got the idea, the execution was a mere colouring exercise which I found tiresome.  I now paint mostly seascapes and abstracts where I am preoccupied as I paint with the balance of the colouring, the harmonies of the composition, and the looseness of the executing brushwork or knife play.

4)  Do you think visual art, music and health are related and if so how?

4. Certainly mental health can be directly affected by the experience of art and music, and so it is that one’s general well being and even recovery from ill health can be positively influenced by art and music.

ButterflyFish4b.  I have had personal experience of working with deprived children on a mural in their special school.  Many of them were emotionally disturbed and their behaviour when engaged with the painting was completely different from their actions in normal class work which I had observed.  They were calm and thoughtful and even expressed themselves verbally with greater insight, steadiness and lack of anger than even a few minutes earlier.

5)  How do you feel when you are painting?

5.  Happy, of course, to be getting to grips with the subject but also frustrated and angry when my means of expression fall short of the desired effect.  I suppose the overall mood is one of happiness in the act of creation but it is punctuated with darker feelings, too.

6)  Do you identify with your subject and if so, on what level?

6.  As each subject is an attempt to recreate my past, there is not a sense of identification with the subject as an external object, but an externalising of a part of myself.  There is therefore a common identity of me and the subject, which I suppose explains the tearing I feel whenever I part with a sale!

7)  When do you do your best work?

7.  I don’t know.  It feels when it’s over almost as if the result is an accident and I therefore find it very difficult to retrace my steps and recreate the same process.  I have had commissions for repeat work and find them very frustrating as there is a mechanical element to the repetition which I do not feel in the original act of creation.

8)  Does art help you connect with your “higher” self?

8. Yes, in the sense that thinking of and experiencing art is always a purer state than everyday life and, at least until things go wrong, more elevated!

9)  What is abstract art for you?                                           StreetofFire

9. While my abstract paintings are inspired by Caribbean subjects such as forests or seascapes, they become abstract when I lose all attention to form and become fully engaged with just colours and their relationships.  Form then develops from colour instead of dictating to it.  The result is what it is, either pleasing as colour or as colour plus form.  I am facing one of my larger works on my living room wall which is a blending from bottom to top from red through orange to yellow and on to very pale, washed out, yellow.  The form is simplified to almost nothing and the colour is almost all.

To see more of Sula’s art, please visit the links below.

http://www.sualartist.co.uk

http://www.sulaartist.com

TO THE READER:  What in Sula’s art do you like the most and how does it relate to you?

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Filed in: ART • Tuesday, October 27th, 2009

Comments

By Devi Lebouteiller on October 29th, 2009 at 8:08 am

Very inspiring,admirative and nostalgic, coming from that part of the world myself!
Keep up the good works,and yes art,music and health does go together!!!!!

The art is simple, the colors are vibrant, a pleasure to look at and true love does sometimes travel on a gravel road!!!!!

 

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About

My name is Michele Andree. I am an artist, I paint musicians in action. I think I’m a musician at heart, my instrument being… a brush, so I play…brush and I paint… music.
I love jazz. I call it freedom music. It promotes special values. I love intelligent people and good conversations.

Some people ask me how music relates to art. Personally I find they go hand in hand. Music is what turns me on to painting. It makes me see colours