‘It Got Dark So Quickly’ is a new body of work from emerging Australian contemporary landscape painter, Fiona Barrett-Clark. Fiona’s paintings reflect the beauty of an unassuming and unexaggerated Australian landscape, void of people, but not always the spectre of humanity’s presence. She particularly focusses in on the twilight sky, in these works – the prismatic colours and cloud formations as the day’s light fades, tinges of pinks, mauves, greys, blues and orange.
The works conjure up the melancholy of that ‘magic-hour’ time of day; it’s about memory, fleeting moments and sometimes an assortment of memories colliding. It’s about kindling a memory to evoke a visceral, sensory response in the viewer. The works are on plywood instead of board or canvas to give a grainy texture to the paintings which permeate them with the old-world feel of vintage slides or photographs, adding to the resonant nature of the work.
