Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 1997, Katrina Blannin has been working on a series of compositions inspired by the desire to reduce and simplify; she challenges the viewer to take time and engage with a visual language that proposes a multi-coloured harmony and a resolute aesthetic clarity.

In recent work the artist aims to convey various sensations corresponding with the everyday impressions of experience.

The process of working begins with a 'colour chart' of colours directly seen through the lens of a camera or drawn from the 'nature' of life. They are mixed to a palette acquired from the settings and objects that signify something special in the locale: plastic signage, aged gloss paint and dirty shop fronts. The quotidian greys and Indian reds of skies and brick walls are punctuated with the unsaturated hues of pink garden roses, blue ice cream, sherbet lemon and crocheted wool. The fairground and amusement arcade lights of the English seaside at dusk and old Technicolor films, add to the accumulation of 'colour memories' that pervade the paintings.

“My palette is the world right here: what I experience and what I am remembering. The colour language becomes particular and is intended as much for its evocative ability as its material quality.”

In the paintings, which allude to stained-glass windows, parameters are colour, elemental form and space; the recognition of the interdependence of colour consonance and dissonance; a search for moments of reaction, interaction and a visual logic attained through flat paint adjusted and often re-adjusted. The practice is at first unsystematic and expressive but progressively works with design and balance, and aims for a lucid, formal arrangement.

The work nods romantically back to 60's and 70's Concrete Art, Scandinavian Design and Hard Edge, as well as examines protagonists such as Robyn Denny, Niki de Saint Phalle, Maija Isola, Walker Evans, Jeremy Moon, Ib Gertsen and Josef & Anni Albers.

Katrina Blannin lives and works in Bethnal Green, London. Please contact the gallery for further information.