Critical Mass

The essential information

Critical Mass is a large sized painting that was created with a series of drops and drips. The colours are comprised of Swarez Blue (my own pigmented colour), magenta, silver, black, gold, white and French blue.

I always like to quantify the style of each painting I created but with this type of technique I always struggle to place any kind of classification or label on it. Instead I prefer to let it just be and for it to be judged on its own merit. In some ways you could see it a throwback to the works of Jackson Pollock (or other artists of the Drip Art style) but I like to forge my own way with these things and develop methods that feel like they are my own.

Complexity and diversity

The painting is incredibly complex and features a whole universe worth of details and nuances. The main bulk of this was painted in just one sitting and as one layer, something that is not normally achievable without a number of paint sessions and a lot of drying time in between. So I am particularly thrilled that I have managed to do this and get the look I wanted in just one sitting.

The other session was for the waves of white paint that sit on top. These have formed some crucial structure to the painting that define areas and boundaries in ways that the lower mass cannot. It’s this kind of technique that allows me to build depth and also create a little bit of tension between the front and back layers.

Building dimensionality (is that even a word?) is critical to these kinds of paintings that feel like neural pathways or have very loos but condensed structures.