THESE PAINTINGS by Kim Donaldson have their beginnings in places visited, in familiar dwellings, augmented by imagination, are transformed into brooding architectural fantasies. Gaston Bachelard, in addressing the poetics of space, suggests that imagination is the means by which, transcending all memories, we transform even the merest shelter into the notion of a house; a place of protected intimacy. Here, in this secure and solitary space there is a certain freedom, a freedom to dream in peace.
Starting with a detail, a fragment, a corner, a childhood memory, an elaboration takes place in which surfaces and sources are built on to the primary structures as if laying a veneer at both a fictional and material level. What we see then are fictitional structures, borne of Australian vernacular architecture, which have been romanticised, transformed through the drama of light and play of illusionism to be finally reminiscent of the spare grandeur of an Anselm Kiefer interior, or a possible setting for the Brothers Grimm. One thinks also of the early work of Alice Aycock whose pared down structures were as simple as could be and yet still hold the architectural metaphor.
Although unpeopled, there is evidence of a private language, of inaccessible signs, a message, a blocked narrative inscribed on the paintings' surface which invites yet denies comprehension. A similar tension operates with the shape of the canvases (signifying houses?) and which works both against and with the illusion on the surface. This is particularly true of the corners which by either drawing in or repelling the viewer, disrupt by working against the viewer's notion of space.
It is said that Leonardo da Vinci once gave advice on how to jog the imagination which was to contemplate, with a reflective eye, the cracks in an old wall. There, he suggested, is a map in the lines that time draws on such walls which appeared to chart a new continent. We may perhaps take such advice as a point of departure for Kim Donaldson's paintings.