Sand Castle 2022

Zoe Hawk has made this dreamy, strange, and melancholic painting on an unknown date with an unknown medium - maybe oil? The light is like something from a Renaissance painting. It looks like a memory, or a dream. I imagine the artist on a quest to reconcile the real and the ideal. The girls are playing in sand on a beach, but there is something eerie about the situation. They seem disconnected from each other. Are they building the castles up or knocking them down? Is it a scene of creation or destruction? Maybe both? The light is very even and matte. The tones of the sand and the girls' skin feel so sensual. The colours look like she’s building up the shadows in thin, translucent layers. The girl in the red swimsuit could have stepped out of a Balthus painting. The girl in the sea with her arms raised is a callback to centuries of paintings of people on beaches. It's this constant conversation, this call and response across time. Painting’s like that - an embodied expression, ambiguous and uncertain, where meanings accumulate and are never really fixed.