In Wilderness Life (2016), Nina Pryde addresses the viewers allusively, inviting an engagement of sensibility, but never arriving at a definitive meaning. It depicts a woman holding an umbrella and...
In Wilderness Life (2016), Nina Pryde addresses the viewers allusively, inviting an engagement of sensibility, but never arriving at a definitive meaning. It depicts a woman holding an umbrella and a man, approaching the entrance of a deep cave. Among this dark-ness, the artist paints a ray of light emanating out of this cavity. It is full of promise and paves the way for the figures. The figures in the painting calls to mind the pilgrim’s progress within the literary tradition. Like the yellow brick road from L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz”, Pryde depicts the journey as full of uncertainty and mystery. As Stuart Curver notes, we have an “instinc-tive appetite for the manifestly unreal”. Wilderness Life (2016) plays on this idea.
In this work, the artist’s style is very avant-garde. Unlike traditional Chinese ink painting, there is no meticulous delineation of trees, rocks, hills or waterfalls. Her abstract approach resembles Western painting to a great extent. The carefree brushwork calls to mind Jackson Pollock’s flings, splatters and drips. Wen C. Fong notes that “because of the Cultural Revolution of 1966 to 1976, young Chinese painters have lacked training in traditional styles and they have little hope of competing aginst their elders in brush painting and calligraphy. Since the early 1980s, many have experimented with Western styles- abstract expressionism, post-modern super realism, neo-expressionism.” Pryde’s painting reflects this combination of Chinese and Western techniques.