Three figures emerge from a wash of colour as if from the haze of a dream. These are the imaginings of British painter Antonia Showering, whose narratives flickers across the canvas like sputtering gas lamps. Illuminations come in the form of tender embraces and wandering dogs, strange landscapes and rushing water. Her paintings swell with human emotion, and the criss-crossed paths of chance meetings and missed connections, as stories within stories unfold.
Look closer, and you will see a detail that at first you missed, two children disappearing down a hillside, or an apple discarded just so on a plate. While these moments of the unexpected tremble in her languid scenes, there remains an unspoken rhythm to Showering’s paintings, as if a drum were being beaten just out of the frame in an endless march.
There are no main characters in Showering’s stories, no glossy spotlight upon one individual. Instead she depicts an ever-renewing cast of many players, acting out their worries and their whims. Much like life itself…
