Brice Marden noted how with an abstract image compared to a representational image the viewer has to do the work, go within and use the painting as a sounding board for the spirit.
Here the flesh pink, pale and yellowish, is sidelined by the cerise, rosy and red. Notice also the resin-blue, mottled white and sage green.
“Perhaps a painting becomes a slow painting when it engages more than just our eye.” Simon Callery
We’re does the unconscious struggle between flatness and roundness show up in your life? Are you able to recognise the things which you don’t want to hear and yet you are trying to say?
T’ai chi on the canvas where the surface and flow is kept as pure as possible. The red, pink and green give a reading of fiery feeling calmly contained.
“I’m dancing barefoot, headed for a spin…”
Patti Smith
Deep beneath the paint lie words taken from a very special love letter. I have worked this one over and over and it just wouldn’t come right! This was a big challenge.
“I feel that if I could crawl into the central space of all of your words, I would find you there saying…make this O.K.” David Levithan
In this painting I wanted to capture the story of the dazzle and shimmer of hot midday heat. This is the kind of heat where all you desire is to lay down awhile, on the cool summer grass and catch a breeze. Stay still and summon the landscape of a red summer’s day.
Today I stood awhile in front of William Scott’s Ocean. A large rectangular canvas of midnight blue, divided into panes with strokes of white. There are circles and squares beneath the surface, there are distressed patches of pink. Parts are reminiscent of a child’s early mark making, attempts to represent a person. Alan Bowness tells us that he has daily sat at his desk, looking at this painting, for some fifty years. Despite the repeated attention there remains an air of mystery for him that keeps him hooked.
What colours are you seeing today?
” I was seeing colours in the iridescence that he did not see – and I have been seing them ever since, or attempting to, because colours hide, they will only show themselves under the right conditions, and only to certain eyes at certain times.” From Blinks by Winifred Nicholson
“In the activity of making a painting, you come face to face with the fact that every time that you do it, there’s always a moment where you could make a bad one. ” Sebastian Black
“The soul should always stand ajar, ready to welcome the ecstatic experience.” Emily Dickinson
JudithAnnBrown 