Edition of 90
Etching on 300gsm Somerset White Velvet. Printed by Paupers Press, London.
56 x 72 cm (22 x 28 in)
Signed, numbered and dated by the artist
Special launch price £380 (Normal price £450)
A prolific painter and printmaker, Billy Childish is known for his uninhibited, expressive imagery characterised by a resonant vitality. While his earlier methods of printing focused primarily on woodcut prints with a raw and immediate physicality, 'Girl in Snow With Tree' presents a movement towards more complex imagery and techniques, a development paralleled in Childish's recent paintings.
'Girl in Snow With Tree' is an etching - an inherently slower-paced medium which requires several rounds of patient proofing. This more intricate and perhaps contemplative process resonates with the quiet poetry of the image - one of the artist's daughter playing in a snowy yard. Somehow dreamlike and delicate, 'Girl in Snow with Tree' recalls less the vigour of the German Expressionists but rather a more magical or visionary pictorial language reminiscent of Odilon Redon or even Peter Doig, with whom Childish studied at St Martin's in the 1980's.
Describing his work as "not cluttered with worry," Billy Childish's art has a strangely liberating impact on the viewer. 'Girl in Snow With Tree' encapsulates the emotional resonance of Childish's work, rendering the depiction of a simple and typical moment a powerful and vital work of art.
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