Intimate Immensities

This series of paintings are experiments of composition and colour using the pouring and soak -stain technique to reveal more about the Inner Landscape. They ultimately are paintings that bring to the forefront visual observations of colour and configurations of the world around us.

Working on a smaller scale, enables me to observe and investigate the alchemy of paint more closely, as I then evaluate the composition and make small interventions of colour. I have tried to push myself to use bolder and brighter colours, again playing with colour theory to encourage the push and pull of dimensions to mirror nature’s constant dynamic flux internally and externally and the relationship between the two.

“To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of ‘pushing paint’, breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing…” writes James Elkins in his essay Intention, Meaning, and Substance in the Phenomenology of Abstract Painting. Here Elkinsamplifies how the experience of painting is of importance when we consider the meaning and aesthetics of a painting, it is through this communication of ‘material memories’ that the process has precedence in the work. My paintings explore the playful ness and self-discovery in the experimentation of paint and by doing so, the material is allowed to act as if it has a life of its own, giving vitality to the landscape, a fluidity and softness that transcends a feeling of being and existing in this ambiguous space.

Although these painting began as experiments for larger works, I have found them to work well on their own with and in partnership with some of my larger works. I really like the idea of presenting these canvases alongside larger frames, scattered on the wall to help create a narrative of an internal and external world. To scatter them heighten their sense of experienced landscape, requiring the viewer to be consumed by these glimpses of an experienced natural world.