Cantata Giubilante
Yvonne Audette
Details
- Artist
- Yvonne Audette
- Title
- Cantata Giubilante
- Year
- 2014
- Medium
- oil on plywood
- Size
- 92 x 122 cm
- Details
signed lower right: ya
signed verso: audette 2014
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Provenance
the artist
Further Information
“Bach’s cantatas breathed for me a kind of mystical joy and I tried in my paintings to relate the vibrations of tone and colour to the sound. Musical pitch and tone reverberate to me in colour … Vivid tone-pictures. Infinite variety of colours and textures. The melody is woven into both the instrumental and vocal lines. The musicality of the abstract mark is what I aimed at. I studied the counterpoint in Bach, having played the piano myself … I tried to create these combinations of two or more independent melodies in line and colour, and create in line and colour harmonic textures equivalent to this counterpoint.”
Audette artist notes, 1999 as quoted in Christopher Heathcote and Bruce Adams, Yvonne Audette Paintings and Drawings 1949 - 2014, Macmillan, 2014, p.169
The 2014 monograph about Audette’s work summarises her artistic development as a “peripatetic journey that began with an ambitious young student going between her distinctively different, somewhat misanthropic but always inspiring teachers. Then there was her shift from Sydney to New York, and the maturation of her work in Italy, a cultural environment beautifully encrusted by the past yet enlivened by modern panache. In mid-career she uprooted herself from all this to return to her city of birth, only to abandon it again for the high pocket of forest growth that became the private space that nurtured her later work.” (Heathcote & Bruce, 2014, p. 173)
A dedicated student, Audette actively sought to surround and expose herself to contemporary art sources, experiences and teachers in order to absorb and redefine in her own unique oeuvre. This in turn undergoes her rigorous examination, with later work referring to and reenergised by earlier constructions. Her abstraction is complex, deliberate and carefully constructed, although there is an element of intuition, with the formal construct often based on capturing the essence of a sensation, season or place. Much of her drawing and painting relates to music, a natural fit being a synthesis of discipline and creativity. Audette has explored the idea of representing cantantas, music for voice and instrument, throughout her career, evidence of the cyclical influences on her art.