31st October 2006
My mind as a garden
I only paint what I believe to be beautiful. Beauty holds the key to inspiration.
This is an exploration. The paintings on this site are not a means to an end but a part of a process. The process does not end with the finishing of one painting.it continues with each consequential work. It gathers momentum, not unlike a small snowball turns into a huge ball of snow after being rolled in the deep layer of snow on the ground. I am rolling these intial images round my subconscious being. I take them in through my visual senses, then through an unknown inner process they gather courage and resolve into an abstract state.
I usually work with water based paint, acrylic, watercolour or gouache. I enjoy the idea that the medium can also offer input into where my next mark goes. This happens when the paint merges with another, making independent colours, or a particular depth of colour appearing which enhances an appearance. Sometimes a colour will suggest another colour which I could not see in my mind as its partner, and they sit beside each other for a while before suggesting others. In this way the colour offers input and makes autonomous decisions. I always have the last say on whether these apparently serendipitous marks remain. So in a way, they are considered marks.
Most of my ‘observed’ paintings continue to relate strongly in a visual sense to their original source. You will see them on the web site under the titles of Flowers or Landscape. The resultant combinations and the next step on in these categories is the abstract.
The boundaries that I find in myself (discipline) towards an image are removed when the imagery starts to disconnect itself from its origins and start on an inward journey through my eyes then my mind and finally my heart.