Paula McArdle - 1971 – STAFFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND

Romantic Evening

Dumb Waiter

Chorus Line

Yellow Bathtub

PAULA McARDLE
BORN 1971 – STAFFORDSHIRE, ENGLAND

Naïve art has no past and no future. It captures the ‘now’. Whereas the trained artist cannot ignore the art of his predecessors and contemporaries, naïve artists work as if on a dessert island, creating images of the world around them, mingled with their imagination, without the barrier of tradition.

The work of McArdle springs from a sense of joy and bemusement of the world around her. Sketching wherever she goes, she translates what she sees into her language of imagery, leading us gently into her dream world, giving us her insight into the curious and sometimes ungainly figures which people her world.

McArdle paints what she sees, either from her daily life or her imagination. The images are transferred directly from her consciousness to the paper without being filtered. Her figures are often placed in a cultural landscape of her grandparents’ era and are dressed in antiquated costumes, as if with a childlike magic the affinity between our sentiments of today and the past are being highlighted.
Her humanity is never far from the surface. Every scene has a discreet tongue in cheek feeling behind it. A gentle mockery of our sentiments and morals is ever present, but at the same time her work shows a love and compassion of a heart that is touched with a discreet wonder of "La Comedie Humaine."
Even her colours have a discreet feeling. Her prefences for shell pinks, soft greys, bluey greens and warm browns, show emotional significance. They are clues to the nature of the image. Her delight in texture, having worked in textiles, is ever present and serves to give an underlying richness to the picture, sometimes creating a life of it’s own as certain areas of the image become more three-dimensional.
Above all, the art of McArdle, like all innocent Naïve Art, is a pure manifestation of joy, taking us back to more innocent times.