I just need to capture these words before they slip from my mind.
For me, more than half of what makes a painting complete is in building a good relationship with the art materials, and how they work. Although the goal is obvious: to portray an image (usually a photograph for me at the minute), the process demands first picking colour and constitution of the material, paint (on paper/ canvas).
Personally, I prefer my paintings that you might want to call “abstract”. And my favorite of these, are ones I’ve been working on in my mind for maybe a day or two or more. But no painting is truly abstract, and my mind breeds images that follow when I think certain concepts.
Basically, what look like my most abstract paintings, are probably my furthest from purely a paint-on-canvas affair. They are ones loaded with meaning, and they are packed full of meanings that are highly personal to me. Of course, when the painting is complete, I let it go, and usually with a title that suggests how it came to fruition in my mind’s eye.
I will observe this: nobody but myself seems to openly know what they’re looking at really is, regarding some of the paintings in question. Ideally, I’ll have a chat and manage to ask them what they think of it themselves! I like that. I build the ship, you sail it. If you like the colours, composition and ethic and energy, that’s enough.
If you want to know, however, the origins of an image like this, I will tell you what I can. Not everything, as many things are still a mystery. But there’s definite concepts and energies, colours, forms and even some feelings involved in the generation of my conceptual abstractions.
“Conceptual abstraction” is a word I’ve used since about 2014 to describe this sort of art. Because although a big load of processes go on in my mind, and I fill the page or canvas with meanings, eventually and ultimately, it just becomes paint on a canvas, devoid of it’s original conceptual origins. This is nature and it is fine. You must pick the flower from its source of life to display it in a vase in your home.
In this way, I feel like I create my pictures like the band Radiohead (or the like) make their music. They are the only sorts of creators I’ve heard relate to their art in the way I feel about my own. And to expand on this, music is definitely more inspiring to me than any painter, thanks to a bit of synesthesia I reckon.
I’ll give you an example of what a curious bookshop clerk once called my “psychobabble”: In this painting, “The Weeping Willow” i was thinking about several things, including time passing in segments, chapters or years, and the potentiality and eagerness toward balance. when i paint frames on these, it’s a way for me to say without words that the concept is “contained”, or captured. Different colours have different meanings to me in different locations! But that’s a huge can of eels to unlock by itself. Instead I’ll go back to this painting specifically. To me, who threw it together, I wanted to portray an object that was at once robust, alive, yet wilting, bold and yet suffering simultaneously. The yin-yang is the same colours as the tears and background. The living red object fawns toward the symbol representing balance, which is hurting, itself (represented by the red outline). Although the balance is there, it is buried in brown. Out of reach to the wilting years. But the important thing is it’s presence.
That’s what I sound like when I open up, honestly, about my preferred, most personal artwork.
#ConceptualAbstraction
The Humble Rock Dove 