Actually splash would be too crass a word to use for what’s going on in the middle; it’s a carefully layered technique that’s been a shit to get right. More on that below.
180cm x 150cm (71″ x 59″)
Yes it is. Like very other day in fact. It’s one thing, as an artist who paints for himself, that I have in abundance. Freedom. The ability to move in a million different directions whenever I see fit.
Of course, this also comes with inherent problems too. How on earth do you decide what you should and shouldn’t paint? Who is ever going to like it? Why bother at all? It’s a never-ending roller-coaster of peaks and troughs and one that’s impossible to get off.
Ah yes, the elephant in the room – Mark Rothko – and artist with a value and reverence that’s up there with all the greatest names in 20th Century art. His use of coloured blocks is now the stuff of legend.
There’s no way I would ever compare anything I do to Rothko because his work has absolutely no influence on this painting or indeed any other I have done. It’s just that whenever blocks of colour get discussed his name never seems to be far away.
Yes, well spotted, it is. And I’m not going to suggest otherwise. However, to stop the story there would be to miss the point completely.
What the splash represents is a painstaking trial of paint and technique to get something translated from mind to canvas. The thing that makes this painting is what’s going on in the centre.
It’s an amalgamation of achieving the right mix of colour in the right consistency, the right method of applying and then controlling this huge canvas on my new robotic spin table to a precise speed to get the paint applications moving with an exact amount of centrifugal force.
Still with me? That’s right – a spin machine. Built with the help of a robotics engineer and a shit load of clever electronics. The story isn’t over when the paint is where I want it to be though; it has to be prevented from falling into the centre again so this involves around five hours of turning, every twenty minutes, from face-up to face-down.
From the textured pattern relief in the deep black at the top to the smoothness of the red underneath, the subtlety and nuances of the background applications are worth the ticket price alone! Black and purple are blended but red and silver are not.
One minute you sink into the dark abyss and the next you’re slapped in the face with a deep blood red. And that’s just the base layer.
But the main attraction will always be the giant explosion of color from the middle. And oh what a seductive, radiant mass of life it is.
It needs space. Lots of it.
There’s little chance of this working in a small room to be honest. The wall colour is pretty much irrelevant. It will be prefect where colour is needed. It’s relative simplicity means that you can hang this in a complicated space, maybe where there’s a strong structural feature or prominent material finish, like slate or granite for example.
It’s a very confident painting too. That’s nothing to do with my interpretation though, it’s the colour and the shape of it that does that. And being a big size too it commands a level of quiet authority. It’s solid, reliable and dependable on one hand yet thought provoking, adventurous and stylish on the other. It’s most definitely no shrinking violet.
For a big clean space it’s perfect. It’s easy to get on with, will go with any number of interior colour schemes and doesn’t take a PhD to understand. It’s surprising textural qualities are an added bonus and, if my focus group are right in their assumptions, a real conversation starter.
