Artists Statements about The Frame is the Picture: The golden mean is the most commonly used shape for framing paintings. Artists, painters and sculptors often feel the golden mean or golden ratio instinctively as a certain proportion of length to height making for a pleasing, harmonious object. Which is why most pictures fall into this framework – a little taller than they are wide, or conversely a bit wider than they are tall. It is indeed a form pleasing to the eye. But, in my mind, this comfortable form can also be an insidious trap. Looking at most paintings, because they are framed in the golden mean or an approximation of that scheme, the viewer tends to automatically focus on the centre of the picture. The periphery is all too often visually neglected. A “stretched” canvas, where one of the two dimensions is far outside the range of the golden mean makes the eye move. On an unusually tall or wide picture the viewer tends to scan the picture up and down, or back and forth. Quite often the eye is drawn to the edge and beyond. In some way then viewing the work becomes an interactive adventure. It is this, more interactive viewing that has drawn me to “odd” shaped canvases. The unconscious motion of the eye disrupts the presentation. Viewing the picture becomes more of a continuation of the artist expressing his vision than a finished painting locked in time. Large, occasionally odd shaped, canvases are my window on emotion. I mostly paint with these canvases parallel to the floor on a 4 by 6 foot table, never letting a brush or knife touch the canvas. I flow the colors onto the evolving picture, using gravity, air streams and vibrations. I move the whole canvas causing the colors to surge and blend. The images are formed by the fluid motion of the very paints themselves interacting on the canvas. The brilliant colors, many of which I owe to Klimt, and Hundertwasser blend and shift, sometimes for hours. After considerable time they come to rest. The form is set. The process is a bit like panning for gold, except instead of searching for mineral flakes or nuggets, I seek what is in my most hidden spirit. This movement of the canvas is akin to developing pictures in a dark room tray, which I used to do in my younger days, before technology digitized film out of existence. As you swirled the developing liquid over the photo paper, the image would slowly rise to the surface. You could control the images different areas and shades, taking an ordinary photo and making it into something special, something unique. Painting for me is an event where the process becomes the value. The act of painting makes my whole body, my whole past life, leap into space. I know reality, at least reality as I try to define it, would not allow me to transcend space and time in a single leap, but painting does. Let me flow colour and form on canvas and I have entered a universe of concentrated emotions.
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 16:34:24 +0000
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