I have lived and worked in a remote part of central Italy for twenty-five years, in a landscape that exists in a time bubble — suspended, lost, saturated with golden light. I came here originally in the footsteps of Andrei Tarkovsky, whose film Nostalgia was made in this part of Italy, and whose work first showed me that a landscape could be something you are in genuine dialogue with rather than simply depicting.

I walk daily in this landscape - abandoned farmland, forest, scrub - land that impoverished farmers spent millennia clearing and husbanding and that now grows back untended. This is not the rewilding of romantic imagination - nature is fierce and indifferent - entirely uninterested in human presence. The nostalgia in the work is for that lost human relationship with the land, not for nature itself. I never draw what I see, nor do I make studies or preliminary sketches. Even the figurative elements that have crept in over recent years - vague allusions to vegetation or lit landforms flickering in the distance, occluded vegetation, the structure of branches - arrive by osmosis.

Alongside the painting I have spent a decade building an ever evolving colour library of several thousand hand-made swatches, constructed from a limited palette using a spreadsheet and an esoteric mathematical formula. It sounds unlikely as a companion to gestural painting. The library is not the work; it is the way in. What it gives me is an acute sensitivity to the intervals between colours, and it is those intervals — often almost imperceptible shifts — that can carry the emotional content of the painting. The chaos and the system are inseparable. The method enables the freedom.

The paintings are made fast — in contrast to the years of work on the colour library, the long immersion in this landscape, all of it is the run-up to something that happens in a concentrated, almost wordless moment. Like a dancer who doesn't decide the next movement in advance — it arrives through the body before thought catches up. In an age of digitally pre-conceived image-making, I find this spontaneity increasingly precious and increasingly fragile. The work only comes alive when that freedom is visible in it.

Bio

Sue Kennington (b. London, 1955) is a British abstract painter who lives and works between central Italy, Rome, and London. She holds an MFA from Goldsmiths College (2002) and a BA in Painting from Chelsea College of Art (1994), and was included in New Contemporaries in 1996. Recent solo exhibitions include Clearing at Curva Pura, Rome (2023) and Third Hand at C2 Contemporanea, Florence (2018). Her work has been shown recently at Sid Motion Gallery , London and Flowers Gallery, London. Kennington's paintings are held in public collections including Paintings in Hospitals, University of the Arts London, Liverpool University, and Coventry University.