Biography

‘All Shall Be Well.’
An exhibition of recent paintings by Deborah Grice.
Written By Fiona Richmond

An elliptical light washes over many of Deborah Grice’s recent landscape paintings, suggesting either early morning or dusk; times when natural phenomena blur together becoming indistinct and silent.  The only traces of human life are provided by the precise outlines of what at first appears to be aircraft sight lines for landing, or a sea level tracery of lights on the distant shores beyond a vast stretch of water.  


Title: “Glimmers of Possibility’
Size: 20cm x 32.2cm
Medium: Oil on canvas

Sharply defined lines appear like precision-cut metal on the surface of many of the paintings. Paradoxically, they feel both comforting and foreboding.  They draw the eye across and into the painting like a mysterious golden thread.

There are other puzzling ambiguities in many of the works.  In ‘Renewed Horizon’ the spectral outline of a barn appears within a dark line of trees, like a faded architect’s blueprint floating within flooded meadowland. It might be a prototype waiting to be built, or the chimeric delineation of a long-deserted homestead within a post-industrial hinterland. It is a country where time is an unknown. 

The paintings have been painstaking built up layer-by-layer which gives them a deep luminosity. This dark limpid viscosity, combined with the spectral barns and voided spaces within bodies of water, makes the work feel both darkly poetic and subtly surreal.

I asked Deborah about her process, knowing that the deep tonal contrast and richness is not easy or quick to reach. With the darker paintings, she primes with Michael Harding’s Burnt Sienna or Raw Sienna which are both very transparent grounds. If she wants to create a pale, cool painting, she will use a white primer. Painters often overlook the importance of a carefully considered (and applied) substrate and ground, both of which are so vital in maintaining the transparent luminosity of oil paint.  The paint is built up in thin layers over a chiaroscuro under-painting. Deborah doesn’t use traditional colours to create the darks and lights but goes straight in with the blues and yellows. She leaves the warming up and ‘bringing forward’ to glazes with a transparent red or yellow oxide.

A big fan of Michael Harding oil paints, her browns are Raw and Burnt Umber; whites - Titanium and Cremnitz; blacks - Ivory, Vine, and Lamp Black; and yellows - Lemon, Ochre Light and Ochre Dark. The blues used are Cobalt, Ultramarine and Prussian Blue, but the reds and golds are her trade secret – hues that are used in small quantities to make the paintings come alive. The paintings take weeks to produce but during some studio visits they are only worked on for about an hour at a time. It is vital that each layer dries fully before the next is applied.


Title: ‘Renewed Horizon’
Size: 20cm x 32.2cm
Medium: Oil on canvas

Deborah’s work draws on the philosophy and aesthetics of the nineteenth century romantic landscape painters such as Samuel Palmer, whose work often depicted classical ruins or dense mysterious forests, which at a time of rapid industrialisation and social change, harked back nostalgically to classical civilisations.

Her paintings have a sensibility of ‘Englishness’, a noun which thirty or so years ago when she studied at Glasgow School of Art and the Royal College of Art, would have, very likely have been used as an insult.  By appropriating the visual tropes of the English Romantics, she lures the viewer into a sense of familiarity, whilst using the genre to explore the complex connections underpinning our relationship with the natural world, and our own human frailty and vulnerability.  This underscores the need to work with the ecosystem and view us as part of it, rather than as a resource to exploit.

Today, the most interesting forms of contemporary landscape painting are not concerned with the representation of scenic views. Instead, they use metaphor, allegory, or the visual language of the past, to allude to many of the difficult issues of our time.  This might be displacement and migration; questions of boundaries and belonging with the disquieting undercurrents of nationalism; conflict and war; or climate crisis and the rapid loss of biodiversity.
 
Artists like Deborah also tap into personal experience, memory, and history, allowing residual traces of past events, remembered landscapes, or childhood tales embedded in the individual or collective consciousness, to shimmer into being in mind of the viewer. The paintings mesmerise by evoking a sense of uncertainty or duality: should we be marvelling in the splendour of the natural world, or despairing at our neglect of it?


Title: “Sublime Possibilities I’
Size: 26cm x 38cm
Medium: Carbon Powder on Paper

Speaking to her as she was preparing for the show, I asked her about its title - ‘All Shall be Well’. She explained that she views her paintings as emotional landscapes that reflect the issues and feelings that trouble her. The works reflect the layered complexity of her past interwoven with the anxiety of the volatile world where our dependence on others, humans, and non-humans, is so often flagrantly ignored.

Deborah’s interaction with, and love of nature, provides comfort at a time when the world appears to be on the edge of an environmental and political abyss. Although she cannot predict the future, her work offers up hope and a visual space to consider humanity’s essential dependency and interconnectedness with the natural world.

As someone who grew up within a church-going household, but later in life rejected organised religion for a wider sense of faith, spirituality and the sacred, it is telling that ‘All shall be well’ is a saying that was coined by the fourteenth century female radical theologian and mystic, Julian of Norwich.

Julian lived through the turbulent times of the bubonic plague and the Hundred Years’ War. She was considered by many to be a heretic, purely because of her sex; this was a time that life and religion were even more deeply patriarchal than they are in the present. As a woman, she imagined the divine in a very different way from traditional theologians, whose religious views and discourse were highly combative and dogmatic. Her writing, according to Anglican theologian, Maggie Ross, is much more layered and malleable to interpretation[1] – seemingly in the same way that complex and nuanced painting is.

Julian finds the divine in the land and the soil. She talks about the blood, grime, and commonality of death within the everyday domestic life of the period, writing very much ‘as a woman’. Acknowledging that life was painful, loving others was essential, and even in hardship, grace was still possible, she seems a truly relevant voice in our complex and divided times.

Her voice somehow seems to recognise the significance of embodiment- something, in my mind, that is important in philosophy, feminist politics and art practice, as it is, no doubt, for women theologians. This seems even more vital at a time when women’s bodily autonomy is being challenged across the world by conservative idealogues.

In relation to art objects - paintings, sculpture, installations etc., the physicality of the artwork, and the way it is made, is an integral part of how it is perceived. In ‘The Phenomenology of Perception[2]’, Maurice Merleau-Ponty sets out the view that ‘being in the world’ is not about passive engagement with our environment and everything around us. We are in constant active engagement with it, through use of our motor skills, interaction in space, our movement, sense of self, and use of nonverbal behaviour. Embodied knowledge also relates to what we know before we are aware of the act of knowing. It is, essentially, the reason why the artwork holds such power and presence.

Engagement with an artwork offers up a sense of intimacy to both its creator and the viewer:  its making and viewing necessarily involves our embodied experience. Its colour, shape, texture and smell involve both our senses, but engagement also taps into the cultural and historical contexts within which we live. These contexts are also embodied, as they are transmitted through physical practices, perception, rituals and myths, oral storytelling, dance, and the myriad of other forms of embodied knowledge.

Visual language is developed and situated in an earlier and deeper place within our consciousness than written language, and often involves feelings and emotions that are complex and impossible to put into words. To the viewer, a free-floating attention is required to penetrate and make sense of a painting or art object. This links in to our present and past, our memory and bodily experience.

Embodied experience highlights the importance of the senses in an age of visual hyperstimulation, where we are overloaded with information and accelerated visual representation through advertising, social media, and film/TV imagery. Painting like Deborah’s allows us to slow down and contemplate.  She says, “I think my work can be overlooked in the current art climate, where louder statements are being made, with a message that can be read and digested in seconds. My work takes longer to ponder…  If people can see their innermost selves reflected in my work, then I have achieved what I intended.”

 In relation to this new body of work, she states, “I have an innate conviction that I can cope with life, however desperate it becomes. I pray, I problem solve and most importantly I ‘hope’. I want my work to offer an insight into otherness and positivity that is based in human experience, not religious theory, or self-help Instagram slogans. Not only do I strive to offer a resonating sensation that is felt deep in the gut, but I also want the viewer to know “I get it, I see your pain” and through life’s difficulties; “All shall be Well”.

There is a quiet generosity to this sentiment. Much as we may be angry or despairing at the state of the world, in climate emergency and war, it is important to continue to care.  In the words of Rebecca Solnit, just after the 2024 American election,

“Take care of yourself and remember that taking care of something else is an important part of taking care of yourself, because you are interwoven with the 10tn things in this single garment of destiny that has been stained and torn, but is still being woven and mended and washed. There’s a false dichotomy between the popular business of self-care and being engaged and caring for other things; doing the latter can bring you into community with people who are good for you, can help you find dignity… can strengthen and encourage you – and even make you hopeful, because to be around the best versions of human nature does that for you.”[3]

Deborah’s work, with its quiet, visceral strength stays with you long after exiting the exhibition space.  It creates an arena for collective hope; something that is much needed right now.

All Shall be Well is showing at The Biscuit Factory, 16 Stoddart Street, Sheildfield, Newcastle upon Tyne from 23rdNovember 2024 to February 2025

[1] Silence: A user’s guide — Volume 2, Application, Maggie Ross,  Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd
[2] The Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Routledge, 2013
[3] Authoritarians like Trump love fear, defeatism, surrender. Do not give them what they want, Rebecca Solnit, The Guardian, 9th November, 2024.