Prudence Flint is a painter based in Melbourne. She graduated in graphic design in 1984 and consequently found she was more interested in her own specific and personal art, so she ended in 2008 with a Master of Fine Arts at the Monash University. Before and since then she committed her creative workflow to painting and for more than 20 years her subjects have been mainly females in interiors and sometimes outdoors.
She says: “Since being a teenager I’ve read a lot of fiction and watched films. I’m interested in the interior life. I love a complicated female protagonist, someone who has to leave the group and do a brave thing”. She has always been inspired by Edward Hopper’s strong realism and subjects, especially for the solitude condition of contemporary western people.
She often used herself as a model, painting off from self-portraits photographs, but nowadays she has friends that pose for her and inspire her work. She finds enlightenment for her work through everyday life and complicated situations that trigger some unexpected feeling layered in unconscious memories. The model’s physicality and body shapes give to the paintings a bold expression and final touch. Her preferred scenes are quiet as if she wanted to catch those intimate and personal moments in between actions, or those spaces in which every individual feels still and single. The pastel and soft color palette she uses to contrast with a feeling of tension in each character she depicts. She wants to create a visually powerful and clear idea of what she has in mind and says about her workflow: “Ideas start out as small pencil drawings. I will draw the idea up on a canvas in charcoal and sit with it for a month or so. If it survives that process, I start painting rough and loose at first, each layer becoming more refined and distilled. Some ideas take ten years to find form.”
She believes that if an artist is able to bear with his own fears and ghosts, that means he will also able to paint.
Find more about her work here.
