About Alice Gavin Atashkar

What drives me to create art? I’m a London based painter, passionate about the therapeutic power of creativity and nature. I hope my art whispers the viewer towards a portal of “heavenly realms” which for me "is like a moment clothed in a thin veil - an irridescent bubble… it’s both there and-not-there …an inner peace where time is suspended… awe and wonder awakened…. JOY fizzes like an effervescent".

Celtic traditions speak of “Thin places” that is; the spaces where the feeling of heaven is closer than usual. When I was a child, I recall the sensation of being in a garden foraging and admiring little bugs, plants, trees, leaves, intrigued by the ornate design of nature. I would get intense moments where I would feel the closeness of something more powerful, more incredible than me. Now, in everything I create I'm returned to moments - seeking “thin spaces”; "heavenly realms" drawing on the wisdom and therapeutic power found in the creative process and seen in nature.

Allowing the creative process to dictate, each painting almost paints itself, starting with a process of multiple layers, colour pops and texture to dictate the overall result with detours of scratching in, washing off, drips and bubbles. Texture forms so the paintings take on a 3D aspect. This creative process is both intuitive and led, abstract and yet contained within the inferred inherent cycle found in nature. 

In creating these paintings, part representational, part imagined, part memory and part revelation, I am learning about the inherent joy held in any given moment, in any given season. Accessible in any place and any time, through the slowing down, the noticing, the mindfulness of embracing the moment for what it is. My hope is that this is just the beginning of a co-created story - it continues in the minds eye of the viewer, transcending into the homes where the paintings belong.

So to summarise, painting is a very visceral, deep, therapeutic part of my practice and offers me a mindful and peaceful inner sanctuary, and I hope it offers the viewer a chance to continue that story on.