My Recent Paintings.

In my recent paintings I have been working with different mediums. I started off with oils then moved to acrylics with brighter colours to create different moods; some are bright day colours, others are more nocturnal colours. I was thinking of elements such as water, fire, earth.

 

Some of the paintings have a feeling of falling or rising, moving forward or backward, a transient moment between an image and a non image. I have been exploring suspension, is the image dissolving or is it about to happen? I have been using yellows from soft yellows to very strong ones with a glowing quality, and I have been observing how this glowing quality, or lack of it, can affect the overall painting and how the different moods relate to each other. Some of the paints, being translucent, are affected by how strong or weak the external light is, so they glow in a different way depending on the strength of the ambient light. The painting in this sense represents one's own inner 'I' and the difficulty of relating to what is around us in the external world.

 

 

I am exploring the idea of insecurity, instability.....can an image have power if it is unstable & abstract? Can we accept instability? Does everything have to be clearly explained to be understood? Or can we just go with the flow and accept without judging.

 

I love going to the movies and I have been looking at how colour is used in films, in particular in the films of Jean Luc Godard who was a highly innovative film colourist.

 

 

I liked what Godard said about travelling at night in Paris: 'What do you see? Splashes of red and green, flashes of yellow passing by. I wanted to recreate a sensation through the elements which constitute it. The sensation was that of pure colour.'

 

I am not thinking in terms of pure colours in my paintings but more of splashes or combinations of colours, rather than monochrome and precision painting, so as to show that even messy, uncertain, imprecise work can have a purpose and can hold its own. Godard wasn't an academic in the use of colour in movies but more of an improvising instinctive painter, as he said himself: 'Most of it came out of my head just before it was shot. I worked without notes like a painter'. 

 

This also applies to my current paintings and the way I work where I am pushing more for authenticity from immediacy, and I am interested in exploring how a painting can be developed so as to make an immediate impact on the viewer.