Self-expression is therapeutic on many levels. It exorcises internal strife by representing it artistically to the public. This could be regarded as an act of freedom, of unloading through sharing. A general empathy towards the artist’s experience, amid different emotions and nuances, is thus fostered as a learning exercise.

The exhibition Freedom finds artist Isabel Warrington, well-known as a local actress, coming to terms with a life and career that saw her toing-and-froing from theatre to caricatural art. “I got back into painting when I started using it as a form of therapy about three years ago, when I was going through a particularly difficult time,” she remarks.

Isabel Warrington

Probably, theatre helped her recognise that the whole world is effectively a stage, and that people are mere pawns, moving around and being manipulated in the general scheme of things. Playwrights ascribe roles to their created characters, figments from real-life events and from pure imagination. The actor studies the part and takes on the role, creating a personality, usually with a social situation as a backdrop. At times, this is done through the augmenting and the emphasising certain characteristics, also pouring it into a measure of caricature.

Caricatures usually have a witty but cruel dimension; their strength lies in poking fun at people and ridiculing situa­tions and anachronistic tradition. However, some bring out a level of endearment, of self-identification; this provides a morale to their illustrative storytelling. Artists like Roland Topor and Honoré Daumier depicted a humanity with a few redeeming characteristics while cartoonists like Arthur Rackham and Gustav Doré explored folklore and myth with less pessimistic overtones.

Warrington’s style and narrative is in tune with that of the latter artists – in Hot Air, a bathtub and sleepy bather travel across the heavens, on an adventure, carried by a billowing Montgolfier. It is reminiscent of Odilon Redon’s famous Eye- Balloon of 1878, without the sinister ominous aura of the French symbolist’s work. Warrington’s painting has well-defined, innocent and ‘fiabesque’ elements.

The Juggler

In The Juggler, a ‘roly-poly’ juggler, a toy of old, delivers a message of equilibrium as factors of its inherent physical form as well as through the game it’s playing, essentially its raison d’être. This could be an autobiographical comment as the artist’s life has been a balancing game of alternating viewpoints and continuous recali­bration, also threatened by a toppling over which would also result in losing the thread of the game.

The pandemic allowed the manic pace of life to slow down so it was an opportunity for me to explore new subjects and media

However, the exhibition is not solely devoted to caricature and cartoon. The early days of the pandemic kept many people locked away from humanity’s hustle and bustle. The majority hibernated to relative domestic safety, away from the menace of the virus. “The pandemic allowed the manic pace of life to slow down so it was an opportunity for me to explore new subjects and media. That’s when I really started to enjoy painting landscapes in watercolour,” she maintains. “I had so much more time to walk in the countryside and sit and paint so I started to take my watercolours wherever I went to also get used to painting en plein air,” she continues.

The artist enjoyed newfound freedom by breaking away from the pandemic-induced imprisonment and venturing to the liberating space of the great outdoors. She relished the solitude, the seclusion in being alone in open spaces, while admiring the diversity and beauty of the Maltese landscape. “The diversity of Malta’s landscape is breathtaking, and I never cease to wonder at the hardiness of vegetation that flourishes despite the harsh elements. The unkempt aspect of our natural spaces gives me a sense of wild freedom,” she points out. This fresh freedom has been effectively translated through her watercolours of the Maltese countryside at different times of the year.

Hot Air

She claims that people think that she’s an extrovert who loves the company of others. She counters this preconception by affirming that she is actually a solitary person, “who spends most of my time alone in my own head. The older I grow the more I like it there.” This quest for solitude is more than skin-deep, offering Warrington the space for multi-layered introspection and renewal, both artistically and personally.

Alain de Botton and John Armstrong, in their book Art as Therapy, claim that “the development of the artist provides a profound model of the process of maturation”. Freedom finds Warrington maturing as an artist, while exploring new venues and itineraries, without denouncing her traditional narrative as a perceptive and intuitive caricaturist.

 Freedom, hosted by Art by the Seaside Gallery, Senglea, is on until June 17. Consult the gallery’s Facebook page for opening hours.