Colette grew up on a farm in Ireland, in a big family, immersed in nature and surrounded by lots of animals. She is inspired by life and the world around as she strives to make the ordinary, extraordinary using resonant colours, bold handling of paint and freedom of interpretation. She loves painting still life, landscapes and animals in a semi-abstract way. The work is a path, one thing leading to another.
She finds abstract ideas in quite ordinary everyday objects – reflections in a glass bottle, sunlight streaming in through the kitchen window, shoes kicked off in gay abandon after a fun night out with friends, negative spaces suggested by buildings pushing skywards, flowers pushed hastily into a jug at a jaunty angle, the juxtaposition of some everyday objects left to drain after washing up, a higgledy-piggledy collection of unrelated subjects, upside down, on their sides at funny angles suggesting abstract ideas that need to explored and pushed further to their logical conclusion.
She is surrounded by woods, fields, nature, flowers, deer, horses, cattle, sheep, birds, and huge skies. Every day offers something new to explore because nature is constantly changing, never dull. Chaos is interesting, order is boring.
She often returns to the same subject, working on several paintings at the same time looking to push the limits of the visual information she is working with, seeking to make something new from previous workings, an emotional response.
