Although ostensibly a realist painter of landscapes and cloud formations, Gill Rocca continues a tradition of romantic image making that extends back to the great nineteenth-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich. Like Friedrich, Rocca manages to imbue her seemingly straightforward landscapes with metaphysical weight.

The lack of human presence in her new series of winter scenes lends them a timelessness, a sense of being above and beyond history. In her hands, deserted snow-bound country lanes, municipal parks bathed in the glow of street lamps, or ghostly silhouettes of trees against a fading blue twilight become deeply atmospheric meditations on the…

Although ostensibly a realist painter of landscapes and cloud formations, Gill Rocca continues a tradition of romantic image making that extends back to the great nineteenth-century German painter Caspar David Friedrich. Like Friedrich, Rocca manages to imbue her seemingly straightforward landscapes with metaphysical weight.

The lack of human presence in her new series of winter scenes lends them a timelessness, a sense of being above and beyond history. In her hands, deserted snow-bound country lanes, municipal parks bathed in the glow of street lamps, or ghostly silhouettes of trees against a fading blue twilight become deeply atmospheric meditations on the transience of human life.

One of Caspar David Friedrich’s contemporaries commented that Friedrich was ‘trying to elevate landscape, hitherto conceived as a vague subject between dream and reality, above history and legend, by clarifying concepts and firmly directing the imagination.’ The same might be said of Rocca’s work. Paintings such as ‘Snow 1’ and ‘Twilight 1’ of 2006 could almost be stills from a David Lynch movie - the sense of strangeness, of the familiar rendered unfamiliar, prompt us into an imaginative reverie.

Rocca herself has commented on how experiencing the kinetic energy of urban life brought about a change in her work: “I have been painting clouds and seascapes ... since I moved to the city, which I am sure has had an impact upon my preoccupation with these seemingly limitless spaces.”

The impulse to arrest the frenetic urban energy of the city, to slow time, or even to stop time altogether, has a direct parallel in her image-making technique. Rocca often works from photographs in a process she describes as “re-animating frozen time”. Somehow she has succeeded in transforming aspects of the ontology of photography into a painterly technique that preserves the mystery of the photographic process.

Gill Rocca has exhibited widely in both solo and group shows all over Britain and the Continent. She is also affiliated with the Studio Voltaire group in Clapham, south London.