Article: B International Magazine December 1994

Silvy Weatherall gazes long and wistfully at the brightly coloured canvas propped up against the sofa, silence ."I've lost the word" says this obviously artistic soul in explanation of her paintings which clearly speak for themselves.Where she may be silent, they sing out. Together they form a highly personal catalogue of impressions of Hong Kong.Images of this intense and captivating city come and go through the galleries here, but Silvy's pictures of dai pai dongs, skyscraper reflections and the races at Happy Valley have a very singular quality and unmistakable resonance not seen before.Flat images, bold colour patches and sometimes featureless faces, together create a solidity akin to the work of Braque or Cezanne "I am taking the essence and leaving out the superflous ruffles and creases of my subject matter.When Cezanne painted a tree he painted a few of the brances but not excactly as he saw them before him.That is what I am trying to do" she says.And she does it boldly. A rainy day, for example , is transposed by Silvy's brush into a Kaleidoscope of umbrella shapes and cut off views of trousers in a clean pattern of colour.The decorative result sums up concisely our own oft-seen impression of the subject.

From the time Silvy arrived in Hong Kong after a year painting in a rural mountain community in the Philippines, she was captivated by the city and inspired by it's images.Where it would be easy to express this place as a cat's cradle of hurly-burly activity,she has focussed on one overiding impression.As she says:"Hong Kong is so slick in many ways, I wanted my pictures to be slick, sharp and bright." She refers more to her contrived style,where colour and shape,not perspective,dictate form.

With a strong academic background at London's Camberwell School of Art,successful exhibitions and a well travelled past behind her,this artist is not apologetic about her simplistic approach in this series of work.She says she responds to the environment around her.In South America the dilapidated colonial buildings inspired her series of architectural reliefs with plaster and gold leaf.The Philippine culture she encountered in Baguio led to a body of mystical work centering around the ritual of the rice gods.In Hong Kong she responds to the urban freneticism with a style that is all of these:distilled,sharp,clean and at the same time calm.