Ella McVeigh’s paintings and drawings are webbed with art history, the role of nature in art-making and the possibilities and meanings of painting today. Starting primarily from found imagery of the natural world, McVeigh explores painting as a mental performance of visual decision-making. Whereby these images from her personal archive, ranging from studio shots of flower arrangements to encyclopedias on minerals and geology, are the trigger of an array of mental connections to other images and experiences.
McVeigh’s purely abstract work is a persisting interrogation of line, colour and form through paintings and drawings that capture in great detail the complexities of looking at images, while also eluding any efforts to be read as stories. She sees her way of painting as a problem-solving process, creating harmony out of chaos while combining natural and artificial structures. ...
