Statement
I am currently creating 2-D compositions with white lines. The white lines are on the surface of older paintings. The lines in white form a unity, they work together this cuts them off from the earlier painting below. By working over the paintings underneath they sink and darken under layers of pigment and black ink.
The original paintings are sometimes reduced to just their texture, a patchwork, or collage. In the past I glued pieces of cut up oil paintings, travel tickets, photos into watercolours. I combined the traditional media; watercolour and oil paint. These complex works now form the background of my current compositions. The re-working is in water-based media, to which I add dry media, chalk and pigments, the paper I use is 76 x 56 cm. If there is no tension or purpose in the white lines or they don’t hold together I erase them and re-paint them.
The lines are formed of dashes with a rhythm in them. I often need time to have enough distance to see the true nature of the painting. All of the motifs in my work come from distant views of cities. I turn the cities upside down to give them a suspended look also to make them abstract. The paper is also suspended vertically.
The current work is all based on images of Hamburg, a city I visited recently and viewed from church spires that survived the 2nd World War. In a piece of music; Hubeau’s trumpet sonata, composed in Paris in 1942, the piano sounds as if it is accompanying something completely different to the solo it is written to accompany. This fascinated me and I wanted to see if it were possible to get two layers to turn away from each other, and face in opposite directions in a painting.
The original paintings are sometimes reduced to just their texture, a patchwork, or collage. In the past I glued pieces of cut up oil paintings, travel tickets, photos into watercolours. I combined the traditional media; watercolour and oil paint. These complex works now form the background of my current compositions. The re-working is in water-based media, to which I add dry media, chalk and pigments, the paper I use is 76 x 56 cm. If there is no tension or purpose in the white lines or they don’t hold together I erase them and re-paint them.
The lines are formed of dashes with a rhythm in them. I often need time to have enough distance to see the true nature of the painting. All of the motifs in my work come from distant views of cities. I turn the cities upside down to give them a suspended look also to make them abstract. The paper is also suspended vertically.
The current work is all based on images of Hamburg, a city I visited recently and viewed from church spires that survived the 2nd World War. In a piece of music; Hubeau’s trumpet sonata, composed in Paris in 1942, the piano sounds as if it is accompanying something completely different to the solo it is written to accompany. This fascinated me and I wanted to see if it were possible to get two layers to turn away from each other, and face in opposite directions in a painting.