L’ARTE DI PHOEBE THOMASSON

Biografia

Phoebe Thomasson 

b.1972 (Portsmouth, UK)

Largely self-taught out of necessity, Phoebe is an intuitive artist who trained in music early in her life; playing violin from age 6 and then teaching herself many other instruments as well as becoming proficient as a singer-songwriter from age 18 so she could live her dream of being in rock bands; she is keenly attuned to vibration, sound and colour.

Since 2015 Phoebe has been focused on creating emotionally driven abstract paintings on canvas using oils and acrylics, although she still occasionally enjoys drawing from life, her leaning into abstract has increased her desire to work fast and loose making her figurative and representative pieces highly painterly and rich in movement and energy.

Phoebe has spent many years learning through hard won experience and experimentation to use drawing & painting as a medium to treat the psychologically induced pain of dislocation and loneliness of mental illness, having successfully recovered her mind from paranoid schizophrenia in her 20’s and depression in her 30’s using art making as therapeutic intervention, a self-prescribed shamanic mission of soul retrieval — her art and her large body of work, then, in becoming a journalistic reportage and diary, reveals a long and arduous journey from a desolate place, back home. 

An Abstract Cartography of The Soul…

My mission as an artist is to feel a lot of stuff and to give that stuff a shape, texture and colour; a sort of definition or taxonomy.

From feeling as a response to the raw content of humanity, often unfiltered and undifferentiated, my work involves identification, both as process and experience. Whether it is love or fear, my task is to identify and represent that feeling, objectively and dispassionately, just as one would identify the parts of a car, or species of plant. 

The core challenge of my work, is to be a feeler of feelings whilst remaining anchored in reality; to keep my feet on the ground whilst my antenna searches the conceptual ethernet. Once I am able to objectively know what a feeling is, and therefore understand its texture, colour and shape, then, and only then, do I begin the practical process of making a painting. In other words, I need my ducks in a row; the feeling itself can otherwise subsume the process of art making which can lead to a loss of control and context.

Gathering the feedback I receive from life in this way, I become a veritable cauldron; a container of an infusion of feeling, emotion and awareness. Through this lense of hyper-awareness, in a state of suspense and anticipation, I make my marks on the canvas. 

Putting my experiential knowledge of feeling into shape, tone, colour and texture, my work as an artist, then, is akin to a process of translation. 

If unfettered feeling in the form of emotion, is a foreign and perhaps terrible place for some, then by way of this translation of feeling into art, I can bring the quality and presence of a map to the table, making this terrible landscape more palatable, understandable and therefore navigable.

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My success on a transcendental level is palpable to me and my confidence in that is borne out of the fact that our voices are being represented and the constraints of stigma and prejudice for the neurological challenges of creative anarchists everywhere, is being vanquished every hour of every day.

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In my life, which has included a lot of strong and unpleasant experiences, there is nothing I have not allowed myself to feel and thus in my body of work spanning over a decade now, I have attempted to bring the full gamut of human emotion to the canvas. 

I hope my work will inspire and challenge others to respect, understand and therefore be at peace with their feelings, both positive and negative and consequently of the feeling life of those around them. I believe that’s what we need to achieve in order for peace to thrive in the world.

“Art is an ephemeral conversation with the ineffable; the artist is the translator.” ~ Phoebe Thomasson