Jo Wilder has been very busy and has produced a whole new line of pastel ‘paintings’. They are vibrant and colourful and full of Jo’s abstract imagination..
Advancement
Often Jo draws her inspiration from nature but this time she is also drawing inspiration from ancient cultural designs which communicate through the use of symbols. The headline image is called ‘Remembered Voices’.
I am always amazed at how certain repeated shapes appear similarly in traditional and ancient art around the world be it Aboriginal, African, American. My rational take on this would be that human beings are irrepressible communicators and that cultural knowledge can spread like fire. But maybe the repeated shapes have something more to do with our collective psyche and Jo embraces this concept in her works.
Tangled Woods
Pastels are a challenge to reproduce accurately. The bright powdered pigments can bounce the light all over the place and I battled at first to match Jo’s vibrant colours in print. But with a lot of help from a good friend of Jo’s and mine, Dave Edwards, who worked patiently with the scans making subtle colour corrections I think we came right with very satisfactory results.
These are now available in a series of high quality prints on Hahnemuhle Photorag 188gsm paper, in limited editions.
Simorgh