A View Shared: Yana Trevail
Yana Trevail is Guest Judge Anthony Frost's Award winner for Reflections 2020. Yana shares insights into her work and practice…
“Confined has the feel of a Rothko painting. The two Reds and flecks of blue with torn orange through the top of the dark red make it very textural which gives it depth and a soft glowing feel to it. Great colours great shapes…"
- Anthony Frost, on Yana Trevail’s Confined
My current work is inspired by a physical, sensual interaction with the Dartmoor landscape: the often unconscious absorption of certain shapes and colours, feelings of place and existential connection, presences and silences, the flux of becoming, such as in the flowing of a brook.
In the studio work is executed intuitively from these memories and the evoked visceral feelings. There is no preconceived notion of how the finished work will appear, so tensions arise as any original motifs are ultimately subservient to creating the atmosphere and life of the picture. It is a mysterious process that defies analysis. At the core is a desire to express energy, not to illustrate, and an attempt to render in the viewer a felt sensual and aesthetic experience.
Hypogeum l
There is no preconceived notion of how the finished work will appear, so tensions arise as any original motifs are ultimately subservient to creating the atmosphere and life of the picture.
Electric Blue
Montessu VI
During the restrictions imposed by the government’s response to the corona virus I was unable to use the printmaking workshop I usually access. This, alongside the sense of physical confinement, spilt over into the kind of psychological confinement that we can impose on ourselves at any time: the restriction of our innate expressiveness, both personal and artistic, due to excessive rationalising and schematising – Blake’s ‘mind-forged manacles’.
Confined represents these feelings and considerations; Legion shows the energy of life and art that always seeks to break the bounds of its confinement.
Yana Trevail is a painter and more recently printmaker, whose works, though seemingly devoid of figuration, reference real-life experiences and memories. She is interested in the idea that the forms we encounter in the natural world are not isolated entities or the products of separate dynamic physical systems but are in fact fundamentally interconnected in space and time, that we are made of the same material that constitutes rock, the dust of nebulae and stars.
She won the Chairman’s Prize in 2000 and the Meynell Fenton Prize in 2002 at the Discerning Eye Exhibition, Mall Galleries, London for which she was also an Invited Artist in 2003 and 2008. In 2004 she was the recipient of an Arts Council of England Award. Her work has been selected for numerous exhibitions including the BP Portrait Awards: National Portrait Gallery; and The Hunting Art Prizes: Royal College of Art and the Royal Society of Portrait Painters. In 1975 she met the painter Robert Lenkiewicz with whom she studied and sat for. She was his studio assistant from 1997 until his death in 2002.
Pillar of Salt