CLARE SHENSTONE: The Speaker and I

Ben Brown Fine Arts is pleased to present an inspiring collection of work from the critically acclaimed Clare Shenstone. This exclusive show is a combination of works from the famous series of the Speaker and self-portraits that demonstrate a unique insight into the relationship between painting and capturing human essence in portraiture.

Intrigued by the Speaker, she began a series of paintings that would continue for thirty years. She had a great love of theatre and found it here, you can sense every move and noise that contributed to the intense atmosphere that spurred her creativity. She homed in on the speaker, his intensity and unpredictability with a mixture of extreme aggression and vulnerability. The rawness of colour with precision in technique depicts an exciting omnipresence where the paradoxical and complex nature of humanity is revealed.

Shenstone possesses a remarkable talent of speaking to her viewers, using the human form to represent a 'bridge' between the emotions we experience as part of being alive and art being representative of humanity. Shenstone's work portrays a sensitivity where the finished result is that she paints emotions not solely people, getting beneath "the mask" of the human face, painting the human form as something transcending a solid object. She approaches her work to create a situation where she can keep "extending outwards", - pushing creativity somewhere else, and pushing inventive powers to the extreme. Driven by what it means to create images, equating it to the meaning of being alive, she claims, "The more you push the further it can go - that's why painting isn't dead".