Pascale Cumberbatch is a British-French artist. Her work explores a reverence for the natural world entwined with an enchantment with allegory and the imaginary. Drawn to the imperfect, the wilted bloom or cracked porcelain, she explores the transience and fragility of life, transformation, decay and renewal. A fascination with themes of everyday human existence and culture is reflected in her depiction of commonplace objects of daily life and home, reflecting the feelings and traces of memory we associate with these things. Pascale produced her new still-life paintings specially for ‘Gather Round’.
“In my drawings and paintings, I want to celebrate earthly beauty and humble experience. Using colours that resonate with emotion, and conversing with the rich visual poetry of flowers, I make simple lines and shapes to try to depict just the essence of the subjects. I take notes from the changing seasons, flowers and the simplicity of everyday objects. I paint and draw from my imagination, the pictures in my mind’s eye, or my memory. I’m interested in the feeling a colour or a flower gave me, or the recollection of an image. I try to convey the mood or emotion of the subject rather than an accurate depiction; the feeling of the bowl on a table, the exuberance of a bouquet, the melancholy of beauty past its prime, or anticipation of nature in bud. I like flowers to be abstracted, whether dancing across the paper or sitting primly in a sturdy jug. I am drawn to the imperfect, the wilted bloom or cracked porcelain, and like to engage with themes of transience and fragility of life, transformation, decay and renewal. Femininity and the female body… symbolised by pots and vessels, curved shapes to depict a harmony of strength and softness. The ephemeral and the eternal.”
Pascale Cumberbatch, November 2024
ARTWORKS from ‘Distilled Life’ show in 2024
