Statement

Lynn Parotti's paintings are grounded in the natural world. However they do not deal with a world of fairytale landscapes and idyllic pastoral scenes, but rather with the expression or memory of a landscape and environment.Her new works are based on landscapes encountered during recent travels to the Orient and Antipodes. There is a new vocabulary of subject at work in these pieces; in many ways they are a combination of two themes that have recurred in Parotti's previous work but that she has hitherto kept separate – the sea and the land. In these new paintings the working beach of Thailand is depicted; guides wait patiently in Longtail Boats for the return of tourists and the magnificent interior of the land rises behind them.

In her Australian works the sea is shown from the viewpoint of the land; expanses of hill and wild fauna stretch out in the fore of the paintings while the sea lies beyond, glimpsed in the distance from one of those places where the sea becomes visible only after a long walk; where the vista of the ocean is only revealed almost as a reward – a view that makes one stop and take it in.The subject of Parotti's earlier work reflects the various environments that she has lived in; from the dreamy images of the Bahamas where she grew up to the British and Irish countryside visited on fleeting travels away from London. Alongside the images drawn from her experience of the Bahamas the paintings of European countryside appear at first more sombre and controlled yet there is still a passion of this landscape at play in her work.

Instead of the bright, but relatively restricted palette, which we see in the Bahamian seas, the landscape pieces show a more varied colour spectrum. Parotti draws our eyes to the manmade aspects of this environment; the road or fence, the cultivated land in contrast to the wilder elements of the landscape. The human intervention is not however posited as a scarification of an ideal world but rather as a use of it. The paintings of Ireland portray a heavy rain soaked landscape, lush and verdant but also weighty, a landscape that is simultaneously battered and nourished by the weather.

Parotti's aquatic works place us both on and underneath the ocean; the surface of the water is always depicted as a separate plane. The refracted surface of the sea is often disjointed (both by refraction of light and by the ripples and waves caused by weather) whilst beneath the surface shining through is a world of relative calm. Underwater life is expressed by the aquatic ballet performed by stingrays swimming towards the viewer; huge and dark but also graceful and unthreatening. In other paintings she manipulates both scale and viewpoint to draw attention to textures and forms. The fragility and other-worldliness of the sub aqua world is illustrated in paintings of huge reefs of coral, caverns and other ocean life. In 'Crevice with Sea Fans' she depicts an underwater cavern used for youthful escape and for the collection of seashells. The fragility of the lace-like coral is explicit in this painting and a parellel is drawn between the threatened reef and the fragility of people on the whole. Unsurprisingly, on a recent return back home, Parotti discovered that the cavern had collapsed, due to erosion, becoming sealed with the passage of time.

The precarious balance between man and nature is also suggested in the motif of buoys in a series of these paintings. The Buoy Series tells of the struggle to keep the oceanic world free from individual possession which seeks to partition even the sea.A recurring theme in all of Parotti's work is pattern; a surface of dots and dashes is often applied as a final layer – making up sheets of coral, blades of grass or tiny fish. This layering of a pattern on top of the canvas brings depth to her work. The eye cannot rest on one simple plane and is constantly distracted and fascinated by the distance that she conjures from this effect. We need to see through the pattern as we need to see through the surface of the sea, or through a clump of grasses, in order to see what lies beyond (and beneath).