From PAINTING: MYSTERIES & CONFESSIONS. A COLLECTION OF WRITINGS by Tess Jaray

Suddenly these new paintings are presenting me with hills, curves against a dark, or a pale sky. … I wasn’t seeking this curve – brow – of a hill. But a few months previously I had experienced it: a dark, a velvety dark night in the Umbrian hills.
And around midnight I heard a howl of a wolf from the depths of those hills.
There is a sense of repressed violence running through this harmony. Manifest by something that reverberates through the terrain, or perhaps through the air, perching on the yellowing tobacco leaves and emitting random puffs of dusty aggression. It may be generated by centuries of hardship and poverty – a desperate need for survival. But is picked up and echoes down to us. Aggression has generations as much as we do. But there is no conflict between such desperation and the rolling harmony of the landscape. It is two sides of a coin, symmetry embodied. Any painting, in order to have life, must hold those secrets in themselves. Those secrets that we all know, are part of all of us, but are rarely spoken of, because how should dark and light be spoken of in tranquillity? These are phantasmagorical longings, a desire for meaning, for order and symmetry, for tidying up. But it is rarely so neat, except in our minds.