Silent inner voices speak volu

The vulnerability of artist Joy Wolfenden Brown's subjects stares out from her paintings.

Some are women, some are girls. They are all, though, childlike in the way they lay their emotions bare, through expressive eyes.

In Evening, a woman with skin like porcelain and smudgy eyes stares out like a terrified child, even though she wears a adult carapace of black evening gown and elbow-length gloves. The Meeting Place is Joy's first exhibition at the Millennium in St Ives, although the curator Joseph Clarke has exhibited her work before at his former gallery in Penzance, Goldfish Contemporary Fine Art.

"There remains something so extraordinarily fragile within her paintings," says Joseph.

"Even the rawness of the application suggests a vulnerability; these are works that leave nothing for the artist or the viewer to hide behind."

Joy's paintings come into being in her tiny studio in the attic room of her home in Bude. The ceilings are Burberry Replica Handbags pitched, and relatively low, so she works mainly around or on the paint-splattered floor.

"In many ways if I speak about my work I could just say that I paint pictures and that I would be very sad if I had to stop," she says.

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Her paintings are drawn not from life, but from her imagination. Painting, she says, amounts to "speaking aloud" in her true voice, the one beneath the social veneer.

She sees her paintings as capturing moments gone in the blink of an eye, when something significant is revealed.

"All speaking can be difficult and contains risk," she says. "When we speak aloud we may select what we show of ourselves according to who we are and who we are with.

"In the quiet of my studio I find a meeting place where silent conversations unfold. They flit to and fro like little birds carrying messages or flow like a river that gently awakens a dormant heart. A passing scent may stir a longing for something precious that is hard to identify and thought lost. Sometimes when I paint my heart races or flutters as if I am uncovering a secret love."

The enigmatic nature of her vision - in what is perhaps her best exhibition yet - leaves room for the viewer to interpret what they see.

In New Baby, a wash of white partially obscures the hooded figures turned away, the sepia-colouring of the blurred figures suggesting a scene the past. A Quiet Town is another blurred street scene.

In a few brush strokes Joy suggests this is somewhere hot and dusty, in the bare bronzed arms of the women, their terracotta- coloured skirts and sun hats.

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Trepidation of entering rooms which are not your own is expressed in three paintings, Her Mother's Room, The Meeting Place and The Guest Room.

The role of motherhood, and the way it can obscure the individual, comes over beautifully in The Cake Stall and Her Mother, the eyes of the women staring out plaintively. Joy herself is the mother of two boys.

"In showing my paintings I hope that they offer the viewer a meeting place for their 'unspoken', and I always hope that the viewer will feel free to take from them whatever they will," she says.

The Meeting Place, an exhibition of paintings by Joy WolfenReplica Watches
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