Art
The Spotlight is on Epoh Beech
Art
Epoh Beech studied as a fine artist in Florence, at Cheltenham Art School and Chelsea College of Art. She has an MA in Art Therapy from the University of Hertfordshire and works out of the ACAVA studios in West London.
She has completed five major series of works, which have been strongly influenced by the narrative force and the quest for the sublime through the balance of colour and light most evident in the work of 15th Italian Renaissance and German Romantic painters.
The territory her work explores lies between the still image as a drawing and the moving image as an animation. It observes the relationship the imagination has to the landscape and the impact this has on the viewer.
The recent series are in hand drawn animation, Beech hand draws the animations in charcoal on paper using a palimpsest technique, inspired by the animations of William Kentridge and the photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto. The depiction of darkness, shadows and black found in the etchings of Goya and Samuel Palmer, the drawings of George Seurat and the films of Lotte Reineger have greatly informed her practice.
‘The Masque of Blackness’, her current project, is a re - imagining of Ben Jonson’s Masque (play) 1605 and Joseph Conrad’s novella ‘Heart of Darkness’ 1899; the project is a series of large charcoal drawings and a hand drawn animation that examines the internal world and the transformative journey of the unconscious.
In this work Beech explores the connection between the landscape, the imagination and literature and between still and moving images to see how, when all these elements are woven together, they can help to develop a finer understanding of the image and thus may take the viewer more deeply into their own imaginations.
“The Masque of Blackness” is due to be shown in London in September 2018 and the animation will be shown alongside the charcoal drawings.