Lorraine Hall came to art-making after working as a hairdresser for most of her life. She studied drawing and painting while residing on the Mid-North Coast of NSW, but now lives in the Sutherland Shire of Sydney. Lorraine dedicates herself to making vibrant, layered acrylic paintings full of colour. Her process involves applying droplets of paint in three colours onto a canvas laid flat – usually on the grass outside – and then spraying the canvas with water, working into the piece with her hands and foam brushes. She then sprays the canvas again, turning it back and forth in one direction and then another, allowing the paint to run over the edges. This process forms the two base layers of the work and a point of departure into the finished piece. Lorriane’s work is concerned with abstraction in nature, sometimes adding the female form in situ. Her choice of colour and form in her representation of nature is playful and largely intuitive. In her work, colour has both affective and formal qualities – it is used to convey emotion, but also to create structure and build compositional strength.
