Marika Jones’ new series of waterlily paintings came to life in an old Auckland railway warehouse where steam trains are being renovated. Trains roar past her studio and outside is an industrial graveyard of rusted boilers and scrap metal.

Like their setting, the paintings are robust and register the passage of time - their highly textural surfaces worked over and over until they look like weathered walls or corroded metal. Through her highly individual use of paint, bitumen, gold and silver leaf, and her concentration on a single object, Marika makes paintings that evoke stillness and contemplation in the viewer. You want to go up and touch them. As well as robustness, the paintings have a sense of fragility, offering up indistinct images of iconic symbols - the bowl and the water lily - and nudging us toward the abstract and metaphysical world.

In her earlier paintings Marika used the bowl as a contemplative image representing the body to talk about self and spirituality. In this recent water lily series she moves closer to those concepts by using the lotus form, which resonates in both Eastern and Western art and philosophy. A universal symbol of spiritual unfolding, perfection and beauty, the plant starts with its roots in the mud and grows upwards through the opaque waters, flowering in the sun and the light of heaven. It embodies the feminine and symbolises birth and death, sun and moon, spirit and matter, fire and water. Through the repetition of the lotus image and the use of restricted, quiet colours, Marika encourages the viewer to read these works as objects of contemplation and a reflection on the spiritual.

Sometimes the lotus image is barely visible, a trace floating just beneath the surface as the artist moves closer towards abstraction. In other works there are horizon lines and hints of three-dimensional space, though this is blurred and indistinct like Monet’s water lily paintings inspired by his gardens at Giverny. Dark is contrasted with light to suggest the meeting of opposites – night and day, earth and sky, body and spirit, reason and intuition. Marika’s use of the bowl and the lotus shape makes us think of the vessel as a symbol of interiority and the feminine principle.

Reading her paintings as aids to meditation and transformation makes further sense when you consider the chemical reactions that are part of the making process. Like alchemy, the medieval forerunner of chemistry in which base metals were transmuted into gold or silver, a chemical transformation has quite literally occurred in Marika’s paintings. Silver leaf is used to embrace spiritual values, associating precious metals with wisdom and light. "I’m interested in the formal aspect of what paint does when you put it on in a certain way," she says.

The sense of incompleteness and mystery in these paintings draws the viewer into an intimate conversation. And the constant tug of war between image and surface, abstraction and figuration gives them this sense of mystery.

The lotus flowers, are deliberately abstract and elusive, though they stem from Marika’s observations of waterlilies in her pond at home. She equates the heavily textured surface of the canvas and the dotted outlines of the flowers with the surface of her own skin. "I get goose bumps when I sense something that can’t be seen," she says. For her, painting is a daily practice or meditation - a reaffirmation of faith in a benevolent organising principle greater than we are. "It is a way of connecting," she says.

Like Italian neo expressionist Mimo Paladino, whose paintings work on a figurative and highly intuitive level, Marika wants to access the elusive - the barely glimpsed reflection of a cloud passing across a pool of water, a sense of the precious, fleeting nature of life.

Biographical Notes
Marika first began painting eight years ago after making a rapid and fateful decision to leave her job in the corporate world and become an artist – a decision which bore fruit almost immediately when, as a first year Elam student, her first exhibition was a sell out show. She has completed many corporate and private commissions and her work is held in collections in Australia, Britain, France, America, Japan and Singapore.

She is represented by The Remuera Gallery and The Studio of Contemporary Art in Auckland and by the Northcote Gallery in Battersea, London.