By Heidi Trautmann

I love proper work, I love the experimental side of art, not accepting boundaries.  Maxene Shailer  tries to do just that as I could see in her last exhibition in her small but beautifully tended garden in Catalköy. Many friends and art lovers came to see her work, which covers a wide span of time and techniques. There were the conventional water colours she did years ago, flowers exquisitely worked, Cyprus scenes and landscapes, over the years becoming more abstract,  which she masters very well. She sticks to a theme and tries to work on it from different angles - how it should be – for example her series of boats, small delicate mixed technique paintings.

For some years now Maxene concentrates on collages, a specialty she has studied with an artist in Turkey.  A new world had opened to her and she has learnt to give free rein to her fantasy.  A world of fantasy she constructs by joining together morsels of coloured paper. She has become a passionate collector of all sorts of paper, sorted by colour in various boxes, warm and cold colours, she even used the shopping bag she got when buying a pair of socks. One must never cut the paper, she said, but tear it so the edges are soft and can be easily worked into the working sheet.

Maxene loves nature I realized, she is a child of the universe which she manifests with the ever present circle of globe, sun or moon, the basic never ending form of life. I took some pictures at her exhibition  but it was not easy to get the paintings and collages behind glass without reflection of the world I was standing in but it was somehow significant , the fusion of two worlds.