Belinda studied fine art in London in the 1970s at Sir John Cass College, the North East London Polytechnic and St. Martin’s School of Art. For many years she had a Space Studio in Wapping, London. Since 1989 she has lived and worked in Bloxham, North Oxfordshire. In 1986 she was selected to participate in the Triangle Artists’ Workshop in Upstate New York run by the sculptor Sir Anthony Caro and Robert Loder. Invited critics were Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried. In 2001 and 2006 Belinda took part in Art in Situ in the Drome, France. This was an international project that included artists from Oxford, France and other European countries. She has exhibited both nationally and internationally and her work is in collections in the UK, France, Sweden, China and America. Recently she was selected for the National Open Art Competition 2015 Exhibition at the Royal College of Art.
A major influence comes from Indian miniature painting. Her interest in the subject goes back a long way and she chose it for her thesis at college. Time spent in Japan created a fascination for the ceramics and prints there. Abstract expressionism, surrealism, expressionism and cubism are movements that have influenced her work as well as numerous artists that include Chardin, Manet, Matisse, Hoffman, David Smith, Sonia Delauney and Munter.
Belinda paints in acrylic and oil on canvas and watercolour, gouache and oil on paper. The work varies in size. The largest work is approximately 5ft x 7ft and the smallest 4in x 4 in. Canvases are stapled to boards on the floor while being painted. Firstly this means that the piece has no particular ‘right way up’. Secondly as different mediums are used, some of them very liquid, it makes the paint easier to handle. The canvases are usually not stretched until the pieces are completed. Finally the work is titled.
As an associate artist at Banbury College she makes etchings and mono-prints using vegetable oil based inks. Her work is predominantly abstract but strongly influenced by landscape. Recently working in the Malvern Hills and in Devon was an excellent opportunity to escape the familiar surroundings of the studio and rediscover the benefit of working ‘en plein air’.
The work speaks for itself. Belinda’s paintings can be described as a synthesis of the internal and external, colour relationships seen and imagined.The ideas are visual and the work communicates like music in a non-verbal way reflecting and evoking, not copying, nature. There is a symbiotic relationship between differing or opposing elements such as accident and order, translucence and opaqueness, stillness and energy. This creates a tension. Her practise is a continuing process, the paintings being offshoots of that process, each one bringing and feeding ideas for others. At the start the outcome is not known and the process is a dialogue between the artist and the work.
‘I like to experiment in painting, taking chances. As an abstract painter I find the endless possibilities it creates fascinating and exciting. It reflects the world we inhabit. Discoveries in science and technology have brought about huge changes and altered our perception. Matter itself appears to behave in a random fashion.’