About - Girl in a Swing - Paintings

In Brief:

Inspired by Richard Adams’ The Girl in a Swing (1980), these early paintings explored how gestures, moods and atmospheres from a story could be translated into visual form. They marked the beginning of a journey from narrative impression to painting, discovering ideas through shape, texture and colour. 

Context:

These early paintings began with The Girl in a Swing, a novel by the British author Richard Adams published in 1980. One work captures the quiet of kneeling, the soft curve of a cushion beneath her knees, the tension between outward ritual and inward turmoil. Another carries the viewer to the beach, sunlight glimmering on sand while waves move with quiet insistence, yet each ripple seems to echo hidden grief and memory.

The project was not only an exploration of painting but also an investigation into how ideas, sensations, and emotions could be reflected and translated into visual form. The novel provided gestures, moods, and atmospheres that became a framework for this process. Observing, imagining, and transforming these narrative elements into shapes, textures, and color was central to discovering how concepts could find visual expression.

Richard Adams is perhaps best known for Watership Down, a book widely read and adapted into a film in 1978. The Girl in a Swing was also made into a film in 1988 with Meg Tilly in the lead role. For these early works, the novel offered a path into character, feeling, and atmosphere, setting in motion a creative exploration that went beyond representation to consider how ideas themselves could be woven into the painting.

These paintings reflect the beginning of that journey, how engagement with a story can ignite a project and how translating ideas, moods, and impressions into visual form can become a process of discovery.

Linda Sgoluppi Art