An Interview With Sinéad Aldridge
Abstract artist, Sinéad Aldridge, grew up in Belfast and earned a BA in Fine Art Painting at Camberwell Art College London 1985 as well as being awarded a DAAD scholarship in Germany in 1986. After returning to London, she worked in a factory studio in Brixton producing large scale figurative abstract painting influenced by artists like de Kooning & Francis Bacon. Returning to the Republic of Ireland in 1991, she settled down on the North West coast near Sligo and taught Fine Art to BA students at the I.T Sligo for over a decade. Since her solo exhibition ‘Fast time’ at the Model Niland in 2002 Sinéad has chosen to work on a reduced scale. She has also produced video installations & performances. She completed her MA in Visual Arts Practices IADT Dublin 2010.
Dark Sun 4, 2020. Oil on board 30cm X 25cm
Can you tell us a little bit about you?
I’ve been painting for real since my student days at Camberwell Art College in London during the mid-eighties. As a kid in Belfast I used to trade drawings for sweets, so I guess making pictures has been a constant in my life; it’s how I identify myself.
What is your artistic process and how has it evolved since you began painting?
I try to make drawings every day, and I work from direct observation, which I find both satisfying and humbling. This activity isn’t a means for reproduction but rather a means of fine-tuning—keeping fluidity, spontaneity of the mark, and direct eye-to-hand focus—for when I’m working on paintings in the studio. Drawing from life has always been a means of being present and cultivating a sense of presence; it has nothing to do with producing a finished product but rather bringing a felt experience onto the surface of the canvas.
Dark Sun 1, 2020. Oil on board 30cm X 25cm
How do you approach your palette when starting a new painting?
My colour palette evolves through my day-to-day experience; it’s accumulative and gathered through immersive experience. For instance, I have been doing watercolours in parks in Berlin for a number of years, and this colour palette of the watercolour has carried over into my abstract paintings. There’s a heightened range of colour, openness of mark, and gesture that I’m creating, and I’m excited by it. I have a bank of experiential references that I draw upon; it’s almost like cultivating a kind of muscle memory, which I can then deliver on the surface of the painting in the studio—it’s not something prescriptive.
What does ‘Abstraction’ mean to you?
Abstraction, at its highest register, is like a suspended gesture; it pulls us into an arena that promotes contemplative thinking.
Is there one piece or project you are especially proud of?
Usually it’s the last painting that I’ve managed to finish and present to the public.
Drift, 2021. Oil on linen 70cm X 50cm
Your earliest memory of art?
I have a memory from when I was a very small child, when I was about two years old, of my father drawing on a misty, wet windowpane. This seems terribly romantic, but it’s true, and it’s a memory that was triggered when I did exactly the same thing for my own children. Another more concrete memory was when, as a teenager, I stood in the Mark Rothko room at the now Tate Britain. I instinctively knew then the work’s purpose and meaning; it wasn’t so much a question of abstraction as it was more to do with presence.
Who or what is your biggest artistic inspiration?
There’s a small stretch of landscape on the west coast of Ireland that I keep returning to. It’s a source of deep inspiration and limitless depth.
Carrier 7, 2021. Oil on board 40cm x 30cm
Are there any particular artists that you are currently enjoying?
I’m a painter who feels right at home in the early Renaissance section at the Gemäldegalerie Berlin or the Salisbury wing at the National in London. I have to stand in front of the work and see the surface, not the reproduction. To name some contemporary practitioners, I enjoy the work of Albert Oehlen among others; Amy Sillman had a great show at Capitain Petzel; and I discovered a wonderful frieze of paintings by Edvard Munch commissioned by Max Reinhardt in 1907 for the Deutsches Theatre, recently shown at the on display at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin.
What is your favourite book or film and why?
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Wolf—every time I reread this modernist work, it just hits all the right notes.
Are you working on any projects you are particularly excited about?
I’ve started a series of paintings that deal with the myth of Persephone, her abduction by Hades, and her sojourn in the underworld. These works have become quite episodic, and the story seems to want to expand my work and see me return to a larger format, which I find exciting, so stay tuned.