Studio Visit: Artist Marisa Purcell Makes Colour-Saturated Canvases That Are Deceptively Minimalist

It’s raining hard on the day Broadsheet visits artist Marisa Purcell in her studio in Alexandria, Sydney. There’s a roaring din coming from the studio roof, but something about the rain yelling overhead feels right – the overwhelming sound reminds us of the saturation of colour in Purcell’s large-scale paintings.

“I like the idea that people will look at these paintings and ask, ‘What colour is that?’ In the afternoon when the light filters in my studio the paintings have a completely different colour. The reason I love this space is because of the dramatic light,” she says, pointing to the soaring windows beside us. “If I was in a studio with artificial lighting, I would only ever see the same colours.”

Her studio, which she shares with a tight-knit bunch of artists, is welcoming. There are plants in front of the windows, and studio mates’ dogs popping by for a pat. Purcell likes to listen to music while she paints and, while she describes her taste in music as “usually quite highbrow”, she confesses that she’s been dancing before we arrive. “Lately I’ve been listening to a lot of SZA and also ’90s hip-hop. It’s fun and it gets me in a good mood.”

Although she’s had nearly 30 solo exhibitions in Australia and overseas in her career so far, the artist is preparing for her first exhibition at Adelaide’s Hugo Michell Gallery , Light Savour.

“In these works, I’m using two complementary colours,” she explains. “And what happens when you overlap two complementary pairs is you get a deep tertiary tone. Often that means mud and it can mean discord and ugliness, but because these colours are so inherently pretty I was interested in what happens when you intersect the two poles. So playing with that very basic premise is where these works are coming from.”

Purcell has often used the framework of a window to interrogate what is seen and what is invisible. Her general rule, which she says she “breaks all the time”, is that every layer of colour in the painting will have its place in the frame. “It’s about reflections – what’s in and what’s left out,” she explains. “Coming in from the edge, for me, is almost like a little trick of perception. Each edge constitutes another colour that has been layered over inside the painting. One painting can look like it’s green, but the green is made up of red and green, so the complementary red is just bleeding out at the frame. The edges are remnants of what has gone on before. And that allows me to be as minimal as I want in the middle.

“The work is purposely abstract expressionist. It’s like there’s no room for tidiness because they’re so gradient and so clean. I like to make a mess on the edge because that is the push and the pull – the discord within the beauty.”

While her artworks aren’t traditional landscapes, they are inspired by them – particularly the way light can shapeshift an object in different environments. She points to one of her paintings, a large work of deep green hues titled Cross Over.

“It’s the way light behaves and how light filters through landscape. I was driving at dawn, leaving the bush a few weeks ago, and the sun was just coming up through the most beautiful, misty morning. And the moon was just visible and it was really foggy. Light was just emerging, but you couldn’t really see yet. That’s the condition that I love the most.”

Marisa Purcell’s Light Savour opens on June 27 at Hugo Michell Gallery.

marisapurcell.com

Read more in our Studio Visit series.