My Thinking

I have felt more and more disorientated by the attitude that I encounter in contemporary writing about the visual arts.
I was therefore thrilled to come across this review written by Igor Toronyi-Lolic about a book titled Against Morality by Rosanna McLaughlin.

"What Against Morality is really against... is form. And yet form is the ONLY way out. The only way to judge whether an artwork has succeeded or failed is not to force it to undertake any kind of moral MOT, but to look at it, look at it long and hard, and examine what's happening formally. Inspect what the artist is doing aesthetically with the materials at hand and the quality of the work will instantly become clear. But form is treacherous, difficult to write about and liable to make you sound unforgivably pretentious. Far safer, more socially acceptable, less work, to retreat into ... debating over Moral Maze type quandaries."

Here is a detail of (potentially) any part
Of any one
Of my pictures.

Taking a photograph on a mobile phone means that it becomes easy to enlarge,
And so isolate,
Any part of the image.
When you do this every line, and every patch or part of every image can be examined to check if it is "clear", "vivid and "alive" enough to stand alone as a potential work of "abstract art".
I believe that my pictures achieve this.

NEXT:
To become aware of how I compose my pictures I decided to select three photographs that show a "work in progress".
What emerged from this decision was how the process of clarifying the forms and linking and balancing them against each other is what creates the meaning in my pictures.

Here is the second set of three images which show how the final picture evolved.

LORRAINE FERNIE
NOVEMBER 2025

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Statement

Using pastels on paper Lorraine Fernie creates images of single female figures.

The emphasis on weight, mass and movement in space make it immediately obvious that she has worked as a sculptor.

These figures, created from her imagination, are monumental and tactile with enormous energy and their own inner life.

History

My training was in Bauhaus-type problem solving and abstraction along with traditional painting and drawing from life. My main interest has always been in making images of human beings.

After graduation I started to carve in wood. Some of these sculptures were also functional objects but all grew out of an interest in the human figure.