ART MATTERS

BY ENZO MARRA

Emily Jolley works from her studio space at Phoenix Brighton. Working primarily in watercolour and sometimes in acrylics, she has explored natural and man-made environments within her painted imagery.

The How’s My Driving? series is an examination of the mundane and apparently ephemeral activities that we rarely consider, that we screen out of our lives. Made up from glimpsed moments in long journeys, often observed on motorways, caught for her by her son on his mobile phone while she drove him to kayaking competitions.

These recorded images, which were then painted into a different way of being, manage to capture the feel and rhythm of the traffic, the ever-changing array of shapes and colours, the headlights and brake-lights gleaming, the relay of overpasses, junctions and traffic signs that arrive and pass away, these moments all with their unique energy, accompanying weather and necessarily artificially derived light.

Executed in 2018 and 2019 away from her studio, driving her son to competitions, often consumed with understandable feelings of frustration from time spent stuck in traffic on the M25, or queuing for the Dartford bridge crossing. The series began when she started looking at busy roads through the eyes of a landscape artist, observing reflective tarmac in rain and sun, spray on the windscreen, flashes of colour from car lights, geometric shapes of cars and road signs. The images explore the ignored – road and near-road landscapes that we wouldn’t walk in or want to stop in. The urban travel and all the tarmacked, signed and bridged architecture that accompanies it, always seen at speed without time to consider the sights we have just passed or are for a split second facing.

Her more conventionally natural imagery seen in Beneath My Feet and Feathery Friends deals with the presence of bird life and the environments they would linger in. The use of washed colouration giving the seen grass blades, the flowers and the buds that are yet to open, an ease and unforcefulness. A naturalness we can all relate to, populated with floral and winged exuberance. The small presence they can make on a busy minded passerby, exaggerated and zoomed in on to allow the personality of their exuberant life and fruitfulness to be fully seen in each executed composition.

Her ability to capture the things that are forgotten, that are overlooked, a bit too normal to be grasped upon, allows each section of grassed terrain, each driven road, each short still bird, to be that more relevant than our standard hurried approach to such sights. These little things that are always surrounding us, informing what is more shouty and determined to be seen, deserve their right to be spotlighted and given centre stage. In her considered but not over worked reactions to the contrasting worlds of speedy road travel and the nature that lingers around our feet and that fast flies away, these passing moments are made all the more memorable.