Prudence Flint: Holding Ground

Bringing women to the fore, Flint depicts her female protagonists in an often-domestic environment, gazing into a horizon that the viewer is not privy to. Caught between a moment of reflection or pause, her contemplative subjects capture a weight of intensity and intimacy.

With an array of accolades, Flint is a 7^th time finalist in the Archibald Prize and winner of the Len Fox Painting Award, 2016; Portia Geach Memorial Award, 2010; and the Doug Moran National Portrait Prize, 2004. For the first time in her practice spanning 35 years, Flint’s forthcoming exhibition Drawings & Studies at her representative gallery Fine Arts, Sydney (Flint is also represented by mother’s tankstation limited, Dublin and London) presents a series of small-scale drawings and paintings. For Flint, these works hold as much agency and influence on her practice as the large-scale paintings. In this exhibition, drawings on paper (21 x 15cm) and studies on board (approx. 30 x 30cm) enable the artist to express, as she says, “streams of consciousness in unacceptable and abstract ways”.

Flint’s drawings and studies can be understood as a collective montage of sequential, disjointed or subtle extensions of mise-en-scènes created by the artist with her characteristic pink hue palette. Repetitively, Flint’s female protagonists perform seemingly mundane activities with a tinge of obscurity. In Drawings & Studies, women are partially clothed or in their underwear alongside a peeled banana; performing a yoga stretch or perched on a bed in a relatively empty room; or are standing next to a bed at various times of the day. The nuance of each painting casts a slightly different shadow.

With the intimate scale of her studies pulling us closer, we soon discover that each subject is faceless: wiped clean of Flint’s quintessentially painted expressions and contemplative eyes, leaving a tonal sphere in its place. Revelling in ideas a little uncomfortable or slightly lewd, Flint explains that “there’s enough information guided by their body language” to create rich narratives to interpret that are composed of equal drama and restraint. Drawn between 2019-2022, Flint’s loose sketches on paper reflect a similar type of dream-like freedom that seamlessly form and un-form in an array of perplexing yet familiar narratives. Like a nude bride holding a hammer or a woman lying on a bed surrounded by accumulated objects such as an orange and a stick.

Like a delicate composer, the artist balances, permits, removes and withholds information to form her own visual language that seeks and accepts contradictions. What she coined as “painting logic”, not “real logic” or the “right perspective”, Flint’s objective is to serve ambiguous ideas, moods or emotions that the viewer is invited to problem solve. This logic permits the artist with a sense of freedom to cast multiple states of mind and narratives that support the decision making that the act of painting endures.

Flint’s practice oscillates between a discerning harmony of probing, acceptance and experimentation. Intense and intimate, comforting and uncanny, the artist manipulates her logic of gravity, perspective and states of mind to create infinite possibilities and contradictions that persist with imagination.