The Kerlin Gallery has been a big influence on my research recently giving me Callum Innes and more currently Elizabeth Magill, Mark Francis and Phillip Allen. All of these exhibit elements of paint and a relationship with paint that I wish to convey. I have realised that this relationship between my hand and the paint is what my work is all about, and how this is remembered on a canvas.
Elizabeth Magill is a classic contemporary nature painter focusing on trees and figures. Her work mirrors that of Peter Doig slightly in her application of paint but has a haunting aura within some pieces.
“She is a painter of prodigious versatility and inventiveness whose work has always drawn from a wide range of visual sources. While she has often integrated photographic materials and processes into her painting, in a number of novel ways, her primary fidelity has been to the medium of painting, in all its bewildering variety. Recently she has moved gradually away from her idiosyncratic revisioning of the tradition of the romantic sublime and entered a more personal zone creating a series of strange and compelling ‘mindscapes’.”
I think this perfectly describes Magill’s approach to art and nature and the strength in her process. Her piece Angel (2012) is a beautiful example of her use of nature and texture. The two elements of my work throughout my entire degree. Her work in this piece especially is dark without being bland. It holds an emotive speech within it.The deep blues of this work almost represent the dark night sky, the starts and almost an enchanted forest. Which I guess it could well be.
Mark Francis’ work is fun and vibrant and not far from work I have been making myself; incorporating shape and dripping together. Pyxis (2013) is not only a vertical study of line and shows some use of dripping, it also complements the relationship between orange and blue, another key element of my most recent work. The addition of a circle to work can be seen in my industrial series mentioned earlier in this blog. I think the contrast between a line and a circle is very strong and works well in Francis’ work.
“Over the past thirty years Mark Francis has made paintings of singular optical intensity — powerful, apparently abstract combinations of concentrated patterning and stark colour contrasts that are in fact principally based on what the unaided human eye lacks the power to see. His work draws significantly on discoveries about the form and substance of reality that result from technologically enhanced vision. “
This analysis shows the power of Francis’ art. His work is undoubtedly abstract but also has a scientific beauty to it; capturing the ‘under the microscope’ elements that make it Interesting and beautiful. This close up aspect is one of my main focuses.
Phillip Allen, another new interest of mine, is a painter who has a very unique way of blending weird shapes and somber pastel colours with dripping and texture. His art is a mix of abstract and animation works which sounds weird but kind of works.
“In many of the paintings made by Phillip Allen over the last decade, a vivid and ebullient graphic clarity contends with more convulsive painterly features. His paintings have often presented brightly coloured, interconnecting volumes or repeating, distending patterns within more mutedly toned, wide-open zones. Bordering these spaces at the upper and lower limits of the canvas, Allen’s trick has been to lay down richly abundant lines of curling impasto paint: glorious blooms and bursts of multifarious colour that thickly combine to frame and deepen the visual drama at the centre of the picture. But what we see is never quite clear, never entirely ‘contained’. The graphic elements often offer hinting suggestions of buildings or other tall structures — they sometimes resemble wonky or wildly implausible monuments — but the precarious, piled-up shapes also at times allude to letters or numbers, as if a kind of coded communication were being proposed. Invariably, Allen shows us something being assembled — there is recurrent piecing-together of basic elements — but the results depart thrillingly from rational organisation, towards a more dream-like, open-ended and associative way of imagining a world.”
This bond of the two different artistic approaches is inspiring and very different from me and my work but all the same a good influence. All three of these artist I will study further and will hopefully curve my own practice.
