I graduated in 1998 with a BA (Hons) Fine Art Painting degree from Kingston University. 10 years passed before I acquired the studio time I needed in order to produce the quality and quantity of work you'll see on this site. Colour is the driving force in my work.
Painters have reacted to colour very differently - after the Fauvists departed from the palette of Impressionism, colour in painting thrived. The Futurists too had their palettes of burning reds and combustion yellows. In the USA the Abstract Expressionists got stuck into the post-Goethian/Jungian psychology of colour - colour, not just for colour's sake but emotive, charged, monumental, tragic and harmonious. Beautiful often.
So, for reference, I shall cite a few painters who have particularly inspired me: Patrick Caulfield, Andre Derain, Ivon Hitchens, David Hockney, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, David Salle and JMW Turner.
The work I've been concentrating on this year has presented me with several important questions regarding information and data.
The Information Age, facilitated by the digital revolution, presents us with many rewards and an equal sum of challenges. When we begin to look at the world in terms of information, we soon become aware of how much, if not all, of the physical world is simply 'data' - from the quantum to the global, micro to macro, all things can be nominally referred to as 'data'.
Take the human genome sequence, a drop of water, a sky-scraper or an errant cloud - all are sources of information with meta-data attached. The data used to describe these objects can be defined and then communicated one to one, one to many or many to many:
"...DNA resembles a double-helix."
"...a drop of water is both clear and reflective."
"...a sky-scraper is massive and made of stone, steel and glass."
"...that cloud looks like a rabbit."
Our senses are data collectors, albeit incredibly complex. Smell is a process dependent upon quantum phase transition, sight one in which photons collide with the photo-sensitive retina, capable of translating these impacts into electrical signals that our brains interpret as sensitive variations in molecular light absorption - an effect we interpret as colour. All of our interactions with the world are information-based.
In the series of twelve paintings "135505 to 135600" I wanted to create work that wasn't derivative nor referenced to any other painting or visual imagery but that was representative of these notions of information and data.
For one minute I observed a crowd walking over the Thames on the Millennium Bridge, capturing a still image every five seconds. I then produced paintings with an intent to deliberately disseminate the data observed and instead replace large portions of the original image with a depiction of the painterly colour wheel: red, red/orange, orange, orange/yellow, yellow, yellow/green, green, green/blue, blue, blue/crimson, crimson, crimson/red. These colours have no inherent meaning other than that they form the painter's interpretation of the spectrum of visible light. Bisecting each canvas is a narrow gap cutting between two colour fields. The gap gives some information relating to the original observation but avoids detail; it portrays the elements of the scenes as de-constructed abstracted notions of form.
Consequently as the original data has been almost entirely transposed into colour fields, the viewer will subconsciously form their own interpretation of the gap's flow through the painting and will so create a new series of potential images and potential information on each occasion.
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