Mara Ellison

I grew up on this coast and left it for most of my twenties. When I came back, the places I had known as a child looked both exactly the same and completely different. That double feeling — recognition and surprise — is what I have been trying to paint ever since.

My paintings start with walking. I go to the same marsh, the same field edge, the same shoreline, again and again, and I watch what changes: the colour of the reeds in October, the line the tide leaves, how fog takes away everything but a few shapes.

I am less interested in describing a view accurately than in holding on to how it felt to stand there. So the paintings are finished in the studio, from small studies and from memory, and they keep some of the looseness of being made by hand, quickly, in changing light.

The still lifes come from the same habit, moved indoors: a jug, a bowl, a few flowers on the kitchen table, painted in the hour when the afternoon light comes in sideways.