Beverly Tosh has continually used figures to express her thoughts and emotions: “When I am drawing figures the imagery is moving from the inside out.” “The figure is everything to me. I relate so strongly to the way I feel as a person. There is a quiet space where thought develops, an internal space, a vessel: supportive, positive and embracing.”
Thoughts and emotions evolve meditatively, almost unconsciously, through the brush on paper until finally the calligraphic, elongated forms emerge. These figures are “edited to an essence with the structure economy of brush stroke.”
Of her studies with a master brush painter while living in Singapore, Tosh says reveals how she “came to love the feel, the way [she] holds the brush, the way the strokes were informed by something inside. It is a different way of touching the surface. It allowed me to know the figures so well that I could work from inside myself.”
This minimalism means that each ink stroke is loaded with meaning as it is laid down in space. All her marks are integral to the image. There is no misleading peripheral information. “All my works are about silence, but these are also about communication.”