LOUISE MARTIN CHEW explores the foundations and trajectory of Lara Merrett’s dazzling works.

“Look at any inspired painting,” Philip Guston once told a reporter for Time magazine. “It’s like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.” There is ambiguity and shades of a contemporary Gothic sensibility evident in Lara Merrett’s abstract canvases. These works draw on traditions of romanticism, but express a highly personal iconography reflective of Merrett’s life phase and its intensity.

In recent years, Merrett’s life has changed with the arrival of her two children (now three years and eighteen months old) and this experience has been channelled into the work. In this writer’s conversation with her, she suggested: “As I change — physically, mentally and emotionally — the work becomes a living breathing thing. My relationship with it comes from an emotive place: I have to feed myself with it, in the same way that music uplifts you or takes you away from the everyday.” These paintings also embrace happenstance, a lack of control that is an integral part of family life, the necessary layering of newness over experience. It is an imaginative journey which unfolds in a highly organic way.

To read more of this item and others, subscribe now (you will receive the latest issue) or simply order Issue 22 of aAR by clicking here.

Image: Lara Merrett, The happy prince, 2009,  acrylic and ink on linen, 183 x 167cm.