Jo Underhill is an avid painter inspired by nature and colour. She majored in painting when completing her BA Fine Art with Honours at the Queensland College of Art and has returned from an 8 year stint in London to bring her practice to Brisbane. Inspired by the eccentricities of nature with a strong emphasis on drawing, colour and mark making, the imagery in Jo’s work is a hybridised synthesis of ideas, forms, shapes and textures taken from memory, found objects, and dreams.
Often playing with the notion of the micro and macrocosm enables an emphasis on parts of nature, that are either overlooked or too small to see, as in microscopic organisms. These paintings are generally rendered in inks, acrylic and oils on canvas or paper but not exclusively.
Jo says her “approach to working is intuitive, spontaneous and often guided by the materials themselves. Images for me emerge and are born rather than prescribed and pre-defined. This process is very meditative and allows imagery in the sub-conscious mind to float to the surface and manifest itself on the canvas. This way of working also means that I am constantly exploring and experimenting with the materials themselves as a path to image-making as I work to pull form from chaos to find the essence of an image, idea or form.”
