PYRAMID No. 30 (Giza Morning) Print

My journey as an artist starts in a rough corner of war-torn Liverpool, where I got my first job at an ad agency at age 15. It winds across the Atlantic and through an award-winning career as an Advertising Art Director in the midst of the Mad Men era and later as an Illustrator. It wasn't until I retired in Philadelphia that I turned to painting full time. That journey continues even today, as I work through my nineties. My abstract work grew out of subconscious scribbles I made while I talked to clients on the phone. Elaborate doodles on the smallest Post-it® Notes would evolve over several days, and eventually, a miniature collection of Post-it art studded the walls and work surfaces of my studio. When I retired from the ad world, I let my imagination loose on a much larger canvas. Some of those little doodles became 8-foot paintings. I call those new paintings "Collimations", because they came from a parallel creative process – abstraction versus realism. As I followed my imagination with new "Collimations", I rediscovered the basic geometry of art, those 5 shapes that give dimension to all forms: the sphere, the cube, the pyramid, the cone and the cylinder. Of these, I found the multifaceted, multidimensional planes of the pyramid most appealing. Its shape lets me explore perspective and light in unusual and unexpected ways, to escape the confines of a two-dimensional canvas. What the pyramid really gives me is a place to hang my color. You can view my complete bio/CV and full range of work at https://www.erichallpaintings.com/.