What Lies Beneath Fast strokes of colourful rhythms in Mexico City
MOLLY VAN AMERONGEN
Tempo
Molly van Amerongen’s Dutch grandfather “lived in Amsterdam up until the war, then moved to South Africa, joined the South African airforce, stayed on to practise medicine there and in Rhodesia, as it was then, which is where my mother grew up”.
And Van Amerongen, whose father is Irish, moved to Ireland when she was four.
Growing up in rural Co Carlow, her “extremely creative mother ran children’s summer camps, with arts and craft classes, drama and music. We made wire chandeliers and papier-mache shoes. She was a huge influence on why I’m making art today.”
Her father was in London frequently for work; Van Amerongen visited him and they would go to exhibitions. “Seeing a Rothko for the first time, something shifted for me. I was completely blown away by its self-sufficiency, separate reality, inner luminosity. Nothing had ever impacted me in quite that way before.”
As a child Van Amerongen liked to make a mess on the canvas; as a teenager she painted figuratively, mostly still lifes. Her art teacher at Kilkenny College, “made all the difference”.
She then went on to study at Newcastle University, “a beautiful building with great studios and facilities and a tradition of openness to new currents. Richard Hamilton taught there, Sean Scully studied there. I loved being up north too, it had a freedom which felt secretly allied to life in Ireland.”
At Newcastle, where abstraction and experimentation were encouraged, Van Amerongen made installations using photograms and sounds, “far removed from what I’m doing today, but it gave me a sense of how space could be used or conquered”.
That led to set design for theatre and fashion and to the AB Fine Art Foundry in London where she “learned about and assisted in mould making for large-scale sculptures for artists such as Anish Kapoor, Antony Gormley and Barry Flanagan”.
Using bright colours, her palette is “chameleon” but Van Amerongen is “equally interested in quieter, more muted tones”, exploring “how colours work together, beside and beneath each other. Colour can bring you back to a particular place and it can create new places, full of detail, allowing memory and imagination to interact. Colours create fields, and depth, they are actors on the stage of the canvas.”
It’s why she loves India, because “the relation of colour to living – clothes, buildings, dwelling, food, street life, religion – is most essential to human expression.”
Mexico City also inspires and this recent work, Tempo, an oil, pigment and collage on canvas, was made there during a residency in JO-HS.
“The light, the wild landscapes and evidence of a vast pre-history seem to have led me towards new ways of thinking about what I do in terms of scale, materials and colour.”
And it’s called Tempo because “this particular painting felt alive, like it had a pulse”.
She rarely uses brushes in the initial stages, preferring to pour paint on to the canvas.
“I work quickly and the paintings that feel most resolved are those that take the least amount of time, maybe because they don’t have the chance to become self-conscious.
“What is not clear, at first, soon becomes clear and when something is right – is finished – it clicks shut like the lid of a box.”
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