Artist     Kate Lynch
Title      Five Minutes Before the World Begins
Date      2004
object    Painting
Media    Mixed Media
Size       45.5 x 43cm
Ref          957

Purchased from the RWA Naked Exhibition in 2004

Other websites featuring this artist's work
www.rwa.org.uk/memfrm.htm
www.katelynch.co.uk
www.somersetartweek.org.uk

Five Minutes Before the World Begins
This painting is fictitious and painted as a response to the exhibition ‘Naked’ at the Royal West of England Academy in 2004. The oil paint is worked quite dry (mixed only with a little turps) into the grain of rough watercolour paper. Since the 1980s, my mother and child paintings have accompanied me in my real-life journey as a mother of three children, and through the distorted and fantastical images, I have explored some of my complex emotions and responses to motherhood. In this particular painting, I was reflecting on my daughter’s move to Paris, and probably the underlying nakedness of the mother is some kind of metaphor. I’ll leave it at that.

Although the paintings embody very personal feelings, the characters take on their own identities as I am painting them; developing their own history and destiny entirely separate from the event or emotion which gave birth to them. The title, ‘Five Minutes Before the World Begins’, is a line from one of Leslea Newman’s poems, a line which seemed apt for one of those poignant moments before a big change. I enjoy letting my imagination go with my ‘big mother’ pictures, a different way of working from my more literal, rural documentary paintings and drawings”.

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