Exhibition

  Time and Presence   

    LEONI DUFF       

There is an achingly beautiful and complex reality in life beyond the mundane.

We seem to rise to a bright and broad zenith so full of promise, but like a Shakespearean tragedy, beyond act four, we inevitably succumb to the last act; the hero’s tragic end. The play is over and we awaken to feel the cold shock as the curtain falls. 

There is, in every moment of loveliness, of pleasure, a promise of something solid... so much more...but as we crush this fruit between our teeth, its promise of real joy vaporises before it can be captured, like a morning mist before the sun.  Where is the solid landing for our feet, the shore of home that it promised?

My art is the response to this reality and experience of ‘being’… each picture attempts to hold the transient before a viewer, to open a window to one of these momentary, fleeting beauties… to record it and keep it, as it speaks for a very short time.

A deep gorge hidden away, a pair of pheasants resplendent in texture and colour…. A great dramatic sky… a powerful, surging and restless sea...the rugged face of an old artist, intense with perception and intelligence, capable and sensitive fingers...

then deep isolation in his last days after the loss of a wife.

Time and presence.