PRUDENCE FLINT &
BETT GALLERY PRESENT
THE WAKE
Opening 16 November, 5.30 – 7.30PM
Exhibition continues to 8 December 2018
PREVIEW EXHIBITION HERE
Prudence Flint paints female figures in psychologically charged environments enveloped by fields of colour and light. The viewer is invited into an intimate world where the figure’s pose, each articulated detail, the paintings’ flat expanses of colour create an interplay of tensions.

Prudence Flint lives and works in Melbourne. She is currently a finalist in the Archibald Prize for the fourth year running. She recently won the St Kevin’s Art Show Prize, the Len Fox Painting Award in 2016, the Portia Geach Memorial Award in 2010, and was awarded the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize in 2004. She has been a recent finalist for the Arthur Guy Memorial Painting Prize, Geelong Contemporary Art Prize, Bayside Acquisitive Art Prize, Sunshine Coast Art Prize, Gold Coast Art Prize, National Works on Paper, Rick Amor Drawing Prize and Paul Guest Prize. Her work is held in the collections of the City of Port Phillip, Artbank, BHP Billiton, City of Gold Coast, University of Wollongong and Castlemaine Art Museum, and in numerous private collections in Australia and New Zealand. Reproductions of Flint’s paintings have appeared in publications including It’s Nice That; Printed Pages, Art Monthly Australia, Australian Art Collector and Art + Australia. Flint is represented by Australian Galleries in Melbourne and Sydney, and Bett Gallery in Hobart. She is about to have her first international show at Mother’s Tankstation Limited Dublin 2019.

“I love the strange inexplicable atmospheres that a painting can create. My mother died earlier this year, so much of this recent work… the lying down figures, the bed in the room is informed by this time. My mother had dementia in the last few years. She was born in 1921 so she lived through the depression and WW11. I would walk in to her room at the nursing home and find her chatting to several wounded soldiers under her bed. There was someone outside her window climbing the wall and someone called Pepé living in her wardrobe. We had to ask each of them to join us for coffee.

I draw and write every day. It is here that my ideas begin as small sketches often triggered by some memory or an actual place that becomes a condensed symbol of a mood at the time.

I enjoy it when I’m in the middle of a body of work and I’m almost unable to hold all the paintings in my head and I’ve got a name for the show and I’m not entirely sure what it means. I want my work to transform the everyday and become more like a dream. I’m happy when something makes no sense, is not in proportion, but just works, then I know something significant has happened.”