FEATURE


Being there


She captures the mood of the landscape and the essence of the Island. So how has Celia Wilkinson made such a dramatic switch from controlled precision to her current free style? She talks to Roz Whistance


There is an awful lot of weather in Celia Wilkinson’s art. Her landscapes are turbulent, the skies threatening, the birds scurrying. It is frequently windy, or violently coloured with low winter sun, and skeletal trees look haunted. Yet they are the sort of scenes you long to be out in, to walk the dog or ride a horse, to trudge through the purple blue mud and the swaying orange grasses.


“If you go out looking for it you won’t find it!” laughs Celia when I claim to recognise the location of one of the pictures. “I walk every day with the dogs to Windy Corner which is just near Blackgang. Something will trigger me one day and I’ll go to the studio and think ‘that was amazing!’ The paintings are my response to where I am, rather than being of a particular place.”


‘Belfast it was a fantastic place to live – at least from a child’s point of view. Yes there were regular bombings near the College where my father worked, but I loved it’


You realise then that the familiarity isn’t with a particular place but with what you see around the Island: the undulating landscape, a field of poppies or grass long enough to get lost in, or the briefest glimpse of the sea. “I don’t do seascapes,” she says, almost apologetically given where we are. “I like my feet on the ground.”


Advertising Call (01983) 861 007 May / June 2012 71


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