New Points of Departure

To consistently create good painting, to arrive at new points of departure, a painter must keep re-writing the formal constraints they prescribe themselves. In her most recent exhibition at The Richard Randall Art Studio, Anita Hochman has achieved this. Through using a language of reduction (not formerly evident, or at least of a different nature than pursued through her previous sublime, atmospheric-scapes) Anita lays bare a new level of inspired observational detachment.

This sensibility of detachment delivers honest, simplified, solid, botanical forms – ever-encroaching upon the domestic sphere. We even encounter some forms deliberately severed as fragments and operating as floating signifiers. Anita’s representations appear warm at first glance, but critically, they also achieve this purposeful sense of distance.

I believe this sense of subtle detachment, skilfully applied, arrives from a space of deep communion with Covid-19 introspection.

Dr Camilla Cassidy, March 2021