Throughout her life as an artist Alice Goldin has used her eye, her hand and her heart to celebrate beauty. She was born and nurtured in Vienna in the 1920s and perhaps it was the great trees of the Turkenschanz Park, where she used to walk with her father, that first alerted her to the symphonic beauty of nature. 

 

In the 70s Alice worked mainly in woodcuts – it is probably the oldest form of printing in the West, going back to the days of Gutenberg and Caxton. Alice perfected this technique to the degree where she was producing striking studies of tress and small-scale landscapes. A characteristic of her studies is that,

of the few colours used, the darkest are usually the trees themselves as Alice was fascinated by the patterns that the trees created – the shapes and light between the branches

 

Alice talked of a piece ‘evolving’ “I never know what’s going

to happen until I get there’ 

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:… Alice’s wonderland is nature by her own hand A world that breathes peaceful and sublime – And that’s why we’ve all come to see the strokes of her harmony That dance so delightfully in time ... (from Sven Golden’s calypso at Alice’s exhibition opening, Irma Stern, March 2009)

 

For Alice, many aspects of art remain a mystery – John Ruskin in his book ‘The Argument of the Eye’ describes the process that starts with vision and awareness of the harmony of life around us, and the importance it has in creation. There is a driving force within us, but it remains impossible to understand how it works: we have the instinctive knowledge of right and wrong within us, and there is the constant search for the rhythm and harmony that relates to all of life. The older I get, the more mysterious and wonderful I find this life force, the spirit within us and around us

 

“Whenever I work I put on a CD of my favourite music – classical (especially Mozart) – and I feel an uplifting peace that is at one with life and the harmony of the universe we inhabit”