Points of connection

Looking to develop and explore my practice I want to add inventiveness and ambition into each work.

By building on these foundations of sensation from last year I want to play on the extremity’s of these such as scale and the interaction with the viewer. 

To engage my interest and enjoyment back into my art practice which I feel essentially I lost last year I want to reemerge figures into my work. Without loosing the sensation of gesture, freedom and energy in my previous territories, I believe figurative elements will create sensation and conversation for the ciaos that the gesture creates. By essentially just capturing the essence of figurative elements to let the eye rest and create dialogue between these two completely different controversial approaches to mark making which will hold the structure of my work. I want to explore the boundaries conceptually and technically between figuration and gesture by harmonizing the two approaches, using the subtlety and delicate intensity of detail within the figurative elements contrasting the exploitative, gestural ciaos and often a sense of loss of control the gestural mark making creates. 

Looking at the works above the first one was an exploration of colours generally speaking not used in my colour vocabulary somewhat I tend to avoid. This was my first attempt to challenge recognizable habit within my work exhibited last year. Looking at various new artist I really pounded over the work of Pippa Blake who is concerned with the physical nature of paint and the tensions and dualities created between light and dark, horizontal and vertical, shape and line. Her work has a gestural freedom and energy but a stability of these tensions and dualities mentioned above which illustrate and explore her subject matter of landscape. This work a mimic of her approach to creating a sense of figuration through these dualities of essentially shapes and line in my own work was one that I also explored my own territories of using oils rather than acrylic house paints. The oil have an amazing luminosity and life that the quality of house paints don't portray through comparing to other works so this is something I need to keep in mind when understanding how the viewer will read the work. 

The other comparison to my previous works is the flatness of the surface and the artist presence in the work which many of the others don't have that artist presence as my gestural exploration mark making approach takes the matter of chance into the work. 

The second work is part of an idea of employing small canvases into one large complex composition, this creates a sensations which explodes to the eye and intellects, engaging and provoking by dragging the eye from one canvas to another through pathways of vivacious colour. This idea I am undertaking will be made up of 20 canvases each 250mm x 250mm, which gives me the potential freedom to create each piece as an experimental drawing but unified with the other canvases. Each piece creating an intimate experience with viewer to draw the eye to detail and figurative elements which hold purpose and conversation for the ciaos of gesture. 

In this work continuously exploring the boundaries of figuration and gesture I have used photographic images as artist influence Ian Mekeever. These photographic images which cannot be seen apart from the essence of opacity and delicate details of colour and figuration. 

The final work which was my initial work starting this year was a starting point of impulse to get my art making underway. The work which is made up of layers of acrylic on board, oil, and various drawing tools has an interesting opacity and delicacy between these layers of scraped back paint and the charcoal gesture which the viewers distinguish a landscape which may be ironic in terms of the composition of the being landscape also. I do question my self, does this leave any work for the viewer? I have basically told them everything apart from them having an intimate experience with detail. In further developments of my small canvases I have purposely only allowed the essence of this figurative element to peer through so the viewer is not struck with an immediate figure.

Response to these works in year 2 and 3 critiques was highlighting most of these points I am trying to create. A lot of interest was brought to the detail of the small compositions spanning the viewer into the detail which was suggested would be interesting on a large scale but the detail still remaining the same scale becoming an interesting experience for the viewer. Viewers interpretations of the work picked up figurative elements or suggestions of earth art or reminiscing satellite images. A key comment was that I need to find a purpose or convention for the images or materials I use rather than using arbitrary images or materials of impulse as I have been using.