“Paula MacArthur's paintings are a testimony to the primacy of vision. Light is not only the subject matter and content of Paula MacArthur's luminous and rather exquisite paintings but it's also their medium. Paula's paintings draw us into the now... This isn't simply a celebration of light but of life. The key to this sort of achievement is transformation... A kind of latter day alchemy.

 

Paula's paintings demonstrate that to paint about love - you have to paint lovingly... It's no coincidence that Paula employs a method that eschews easy and mannered expressionistic rhetoric... Light not only functions as space in painting but it can also lend the painting, what has been described as 'air'. Air in this context is the imagined space in which events 'unfold'. This is space as light and light as space. This is pictorial space; indeterminate and fictitious. This is the legacy of cubism. Paula also employs reflection and refraction to compress several shattered and partial spaces into one fictitious 'event'.

 

Diamonds are complex and contradictory objects. There are few artefacts that are as demonised and fetishised as diamonds. Fewer still are as intimately bound to ideas of transformation and energy. The list of diamond's distant and not-so-distant 'cousins' is impressive. Whether it be a life forms like us, a sack of coal or a stick of graphite. Diamonds represent a massive contradiction and like fire, they have the potential to be both fascinating and dangerous. Simultaneously beguiling and deadly.” Graham Crowley, Still Light: The luminous paintings of Paula MacArthur, 2014