Mad Dog

For once I am really not sure how to set about giving you a constructive and worthwhile narrative to this new, minimal and (for me) highly unusual abstract painting.

I have been studying its forms and structure in an effort to attach some kind of reference point but I can’t. At this point it would be wholly inappropriate of me to construct some convoluted bullshit that has no bearing on the painting itself, so I won’t bother. I think you’d smell that a mile off anyway.

So instead I will only talk about the things I can be sure about.

It’s different. It’s unusual for me to fill such a small surface area of paint – I am normally much more generous with my materials. But sometimes the principle of less is more rings true in my head and out comes an artwork that stands at odds with some of my other pieces. I like that. It means that my imagination is always on a quest for new ways to interpret themes or bring forth a new direction – if only to last for one painting.

So I love red and black as colours. Many of the compositions I have done in the past have been splash and drip works so being able to re-invent my style into a series of applications that move, contain and define has been a different one for sure. It’s meant I’ve had to look for negative (empty) spaces in a more thoughtful way than I would perhaps need to do with some of my other pieces.

I understand that many of my original artworks have a narrow appeal and I suspect that this one will have an even narrower one but I don’t care about that in the slightest. At the end of the day it’s a series of expressions that will never get repeated and never be tried again. I like that uniqueness of the painting as much as the challenge to stop my head from wanting to join everything up together.