Paintings about colour
A universe inside a drop of water
I paint because I am fascinated by colour.
Although I explore other ideas in my painting practice most of my work is about colour. Before texture, form and space come into play there is colour. It is the starting point and the focus and the framework that holds everything else together both visually and conceptually.
The excitement of luminous colour and the rich variety of texture possible with paint overwhelm me with their beauty. I feel like both a magician and a scientist, orchestrating and exploring, experimenting into the night. With this investigation into colour, painting and ways of seeing I feel that I am on the verge of discovering some secret, some truth, something key about the universe.
Some of the paintings involve creating an interior or exterior space. Viewers often feel that they are seeing something vast but on a magnified level, like a universe inside a drop of water, a landscape inside a molecule.
I am also interested in a painting as an object, like a sculpture, whose 3-dimensional form is an integral part of the work.
“Yet the deepest and truest secrets of colour effect are, I know, invisible even to the eye, and are beheld by the heart alone. The essential eludes conceptual formulation.” Johannes Itten, The Art of Colour
