Inviting joy in the visual

Through my art, I want to explore the profound joy and beauty in the visual experience.  Engaging with the immediacy and liveliness of visual components before we evaluate and judge the meaning and content.  I like to think that it is a  signpost of the profound nature of our world.

I love colour. In painting, it is life. Yet our experience of colour is muted by the reach of our eyes and brains. What might it be like if we could really experience and engage with the full range, depth and presence of colour in our worlds? I invite your to dive in to colour. Let it expand and infuse your life.  

My abstract work aims to explore more directly the joy of the visual experience that is around us every moment.  We tend to look at the the objects that we see and create stories around them. Only a small part of our eyes are able to see colour in full abundance, the rest of the visual field is muted. Our brains translate into simplified structures rather than the complex beauty of interlocking colour that is actually there. In doing so, we forget the beauty that there is in life and the immediacy of that beauty in the visual experience, irrespective of what it is that is in the scene.  In some respects this might be part of a deeper truth of human existence. 

Tapestry is an ideal way to output work that originates in the digital space. Tapestry is an amazing craft and it gives solidity and historic context. All of the tapestries are made in the traditional Aubusson method. Hand knotted in New Zealand wool and Chinese silk. They have between 200,000 and 2 million knots.

The link between the virtual and physical world in this way highlights the vibrancy of light and colour, giving it a particular physical reality.  

Looking back in art history, the great painters have organised and structured their paintings so that they bring delight, through the composition of the image, whatever the narrative they have painted into their commissions.  We often look at historic painting for the narrative around the painting, the social implications of the situation and forget to look at the painting as an organised set of marks on canvas, of pictorial elements. 

I enjoy and learn from examining these paintings in this light, it gives me great pleasure and I have started to include blog posts assessing the construction of individual paintings.  

Having trained as a portrait painter, I aimed to capture something of the vibrancy of human existence.  My interest has since turned to abstract painting as a way to explore the vibrancy of the visual experience. We see a rainbow of colours, energy, rhythm, contrasts and shapes before mentally turning them into the recognition of things and reactions to those things.  The beauty and energy of that dynamic visualscape is what I aim to explore in my painting.

From the blog