Killer combination; Sharp as a whip. Sensitive as a sparrow.
‘Escapades With Her’ 36″ x 48″ acrylic on canvas 2023 available direct from the artist www.theodosia-marchant.com
“I accept the risk of failure” It’s this statement Theodosia Marchant makes regarding her relationship with accomplishment that causes my own heart to skip a beat. I am confronted and I know exactly why.
My own relationship with failure is not as grounded. Where T surrenders to failure and graciously accepts it’s gifts, my tendency is to fight it with voracious tenacity. Or, flee from it…entirely. It has taken me a long time to understand that it is this relationship with failure, with fear, that has blocked so many of my own creative desires, and the moment after T says those words, I smile a little smile of gratitude from amongst my new-found humility and send it, very intentionally, across the oceans directly to Theodosia.
The post man drops a package and waves to me through the study window. It returns me to myself. I hit play on the voice recording…“I accept failure and I learn and move on. I understand there is a specific process behind anything, and all steps and boxes must be checked for accomplishment to materialise. I don’t believe in short cuts at all.”
Sharp as a whip.
To overlook the role that colour, its saturation and its vibrancy has in T’s work would be remiss, if impossible. But it is in her earlier “Inside My Mind” series where colour has a particularly emotional presence and the artists intimate affinity with colour is birthed. This body of work does something visceral to me, as if conjured from a collective memory we share, I feel T’s story without fully understanding it, and when I ask her about the profundity evident to me in this series, I understand why. “I was ready for the unloading and it had been building. I still feel emotional when I look at specific pieces. Where the colour is more intense, I feel more pain. Some have fingerprints because I wanted to leave my mark. This (work) speaks to the bottom of my heart and even though my entire artistic philosophy is a self-diary idea and style, the inside my mind series took it to a next level one that almost scared me as to what was being unearthed. But I am glad I let loose because it has healed me, and it has closed chapters in my mind”.
“To be honest, this is the most I’ve every openly spoken about it.”
Sensitive as a sparrow.
And as I post this, since having faced my own demons recently and knowing what it takes to sit with them and look them straight in the eye with full ownership, I’ll add to her killer combination; courageous as fuck.
Written by Monique Michel-Di Russo January 2023