Currently resident in Russia, Charlotte Handy has produced a body of work that explores the inevitability of time’s passing and the feelings of loss and nostalgia that this engenders. The abstracted natural forms seen in her earlier works are still present, but here provide a frame for a series of calm, pensive portraits.

Viewing Girl and the Garden, it is the eyes that naturally claim your attention at first and Handy reinforces this with her deft use of form, composition, and palette. Framed by an elegant geometry of cheekbones and jawline, and constructed using a series of delicate planes, Handy has created beautiful, yet alien, portraits. Some of the subjects stare directly out of their paintings; others gaze past the edges of the canvas into an unseen distance. Her shallow perspective and tight focus in the smallest works recall Russian icons, emphasised further by the flat plane of the background.

At first glance, strong lines and planar edges clearly define each subject, but as the viewer scans the portrait, this delineation becomes less structured. Drawing on the flattened forms and non-realistic colours of the Expressionists, Handy references rather than recreates the land. Working in the tradition of painters such as August Macke and Franz Marc, she paints a reality that is subjective and coloured by feeling and emotion rather than objectivity and actuality.

Handy uses a tight tonal palette and the same hues are often used for both person and background, further dissolving the boundaries between them. In Anthony it becomes unclear where person stops and garden begins as rounded shapes overlap both one another and the jacketed torso. Orlanda is being taken over by the soft geometry of hills and trees, and she has started to disappear into the overgrowth. In both works, it is the landscape that takes on an active aspect - Handy’s characters are a ‘blank canvas’, for whom the viewer may create a narrative. This passivity lends an air of melancholy to the series of paintings.

Each portrait in Girl and the Garden captures a singular moment of youth and beauty and Charlotte Handy invites reflection on that which is fleeting and transitory. She affords viewers the luxury of time and space in which to consider “the mournful many-sidedness of things.” (1).

1. Artist’s Statement, January 2014.