Yvonne Hindle’s ‘Supertranslations’ is an exhibition at Gallery North which sadly ends today. It is truly beautiful and she is clearly a master of paint.  There is so much going on in her paintings, they’re like her own individually created universe. When you look at them you feel as if you are falling and being absorbed by a city of colours. They have so much energy that the paintings seem to pulsate and burst from the wall. What catches your attention first and foremost as you enter are of course the colours; they are truly stunning. What I love is the bold mix, there’s everything from soft yellows and pinks, tame blues, to black-like purples. The contrasts are therefore strong and this is enhanced by how Hindle has segmented them. What looks like a swirling mass of coloured chaos is in fact an orderly and structured arrangement, almost like the stratas of a layer of rocks.

This is where her interest in the micro comes in. From afar the paintings look like happy accidents; close up they look highly intuitive – no layer or colour has been added without purpose. There is a precision to it all, clear divides between segments and carefully considered colour dilution. Texture also plays a part in it all. Most pieces are relatively smooth, allowing the swirling colours to take centre stage. Others are far more textured and temptingly tactile. Personally, I prefer the smoother ones as that way I can concentrate solely on the colour. I’m not saying however the textured ones aren’t interesting, if anything they make me want to get my modelling paste out and work in a truly impasto style! Which I may do anyway having seen all of this work. The marbled effect of the paint allows me to see it’s movement; how it’s seeped and ebbed together. You feel as the process has the potential to still be going; as if at any minute the colours are going to start moving into each other again.

What I also like about all the paintings are the edges of them all. The paint starts to tailor off in lot of cases and that is where the layering technique starts to be revealed. The pieces hint at how the colour has been built but at the same time gives nothing away. I also really like the lack of hard edge, I think this works really well in relation to the contents of the paintings. It adds to that sense of chaos ordered as non-chaos. Scale wise it’s perfect too, not too big and overwhelming but not too small to prevent you from viewing the detail. They really are such energetic and lively pieces, if I had a wall of them in my house I’d never be uninspired ever again!