This series is about enjoying the experience of painting and about putting paint on canvas in an improvisational, spontaneous yet controlled process. They are necessarily large works as a smaller canvas requires finer brushes and more controlled brushstrokes than are possible on a larger canvas.
These works were based on the challenge of depicting the ephemeral quality of life in which forms are in constant flux. They revisit ideas that were explored by the Modernist painters whose work clearly expressed the joy of putting brush to canvas and becoming “…entranced and quick with awareness, alive to the faintest nuance, the subtlest play of pigment, line and form”. They were a departure from previous work as they abandoned clearly recognizable forms yet hint at figures and interactions that might suggests archetypal images.
The series was created between 2017-2019 and built on the previous four years of experimenting with line, form colour and subject in two dimensions after moving away from the three dimensional world of sculpture. There are about 9 works in this series but it is always hard for an artist to say where one series ends and another begins as an art practice is an evolutionary process where ideas grow and change, moving backwards, forwards and sideways.