Late Afternoon 2020

Zoe Hawk painted ‘Late Afternoon’, sometime in the late twentieth century, using oil on canvas. The whole image shimmers with this intense high-key colour, like a memory trying to assert itself. Hawk handles the oil with an almost eerie control, smoothing everything out. Look how the blanket melds seamlessly with the grassy surface, the brushwork almost disappears. Everything is precise, considered, a technique that lends the image an almost dream-like quality, inviting you into the artist’s particular process of seeing. The way she uses colour, it reminds me a little of Fairfield Porter, the way he was interested in the everyday and captured a similar quiet intensity. Like his work, this piece feels like it's reaching for something, not quite nostalgia, but a sense of something just beyond our grasp, a feeling that hovers in the air, unspoken. Isn’t that what we all want from art, a little bit of that magic, that mystery?