B/O – BG/O 2005 acrylic on wood 32” x 64”
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My art making is a lot like my life. It’s a spiritual journey
and a juggling act. I seek equilibrium — a fine point of balance between the ridiculous and the sublime
where everything falls into place and all is both energized and calm.
You will see this quest working itself out in cerebral and physical
ways in my work. I make radical changes in media from one body of work
to the next but my method doesn’t change. There is always a plan
that involves order, structure and a controlled paring down to a minimal
essence. I think long and hard about formal relationships: shape in
relation to surface, the scale of a single unit in relation to the size
of the whole, the way in which one colour interacts with another. Since
my processes involve so much repetition I think about the question of
quantity. How much will be enough? All of this is mental manoeuvering.
Once the planning is done the physical work begins. Everything I make
involves acts of repetition that can take months. I do the same thing
over and over and over again. It is sometimes boring, often exhausting
and ultimately meditative. These repetitive processes have evolved as
ways of dealing with discipline and guilt. If I don’t work every
day I’m out of sorts and self-flagellating. Art that grows by
just-do-it increments, work that can be fitted in no matter what the
day brings, keeps me centred and content.
In this exhibition I have taken on the emotive, explosive, sensual
power of colour—colour as vibrant as it is out of doors. I felt
that this natural force needed to be quieted and contained if equilibrium
were to be achieved. Hence each painting appears to be just one colour.
There are no compositional elements to activate the eye. Each ground
is a stable square. Each square is the same size as the next to give
the installation a steady rhythm. The size is large enough that each
colour is forceful, but not so large that it overwhelms. Each surface
contains the same number of counted out tiny raised wooden domes (2,9l2
per work and well over 40,000 in total).
Each one colour painting in Plain Song is actually painted of two colours—one
colour on the ground and the other on the finely fragmented raised surface.
The single colour you see is a neural colour created by the optic nerve
combining the ground and surface colours into one hue. Each neural hue
oscillates because of the slight variation in depth from ground to surface.
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