A collection of paintings by Giuliana Criscuolo forms the next exhibition at The Northlight Gallery Stromness.

An artist originally from Naples, Italy, she was formerly a scientist who now lives and paints in Cornquoy, Holm and welcomes visitors to her studio and gallery by appointment.

The Shipwreck Menagerie exhibition is on at the Northlight Gallery in Stromness from 18 to 30 September from Monday to Saturday, 10.30am to 4.30pm.

Giuliana says that the paintings in this collection were all conceived and completed during the last five years. A few have already gone away into the wide world, some have hung in the windows of the Northlight Gallery previously, but this is the first time a substantial number of them are all seen together.

This collection was born out of her fascination with the raw power of figurative expressionism as exemplified in the art of the great American painter Mel McCuddin. She had the good fortune to have Mel as her mentor for a crucial couple of years before his death in 2022.

Giuliana has found the stories and characters of these paintings ‘in the paint itself’. In this process, through the meditative observation of the paint applied in an unintentional way, shapes emerge to guide the hand of the painter to tell a story. Once a form asserts itself on the canvas, touching up must be minimal, or all is lost. The result is often not pretty. Absurd juxtapositions, skewed anatomies, but on a good day something powerful is born.

She says these works are rooted in the highly destructive yet strangely fruitful times we have all lived through in the past few years. That it felt good to liberate some of her subconscious feelings in response to world events in this way and let them gain a voice and hopes that these characters will speak to people as they have spoken to her from her studio walls for the past half decade.

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