Abstraction#2 (Orchid) Painting

I am a painter and collagist in mainly large scale work developed from the mind, it's memories, associations and desires. The themes are usually anecdotal and I only rarely want to create work that is violent or disturbing, preferring intimacy and chance happenings, moods, journeys etc. I trained with Mr.Roland Weight, who taught me to draw and paint in the tradition of European Tonal Realism, and helped me gain a philosophical/aesthetic position within this tradition, which still is observable in Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, Richard Diebenkorn, David Hockney and Brett Whitely. Mr. Weight, who I met in Byron Bay was at that time the presiding teacher and artist around whom gathered a polymath environment of artists, musicians, writers, scientists and students. I moved to South Australia in 2007 to live and work with Roland and a number of other artists from the school, which was "The School of Encouragement". The two main strands of my practice are oil painting and collage. The early twentieth century pioneering artist, Kurt Schwitters began picking up pieces of rag, newspaper,playing cards, postal stamps and other 'non art' materials which he assembled in two dimensions. He insisted that this was a new method of painting and indeed it took over his practice. My collage work is similar in that it is an extension of painting, but it uses images cut from my own paintings or painted expressly for the collage. Basically the collages are designs which employ abstract space (often aerial) andl formal elements eg; line, colour(hue, intensity, tone, temperature), texture, mass, negative space etc. In common with realistic paintings, I use painted images of fruit, birds, portraits, chairs, glass and flowers, fabric, etc, but they exist in an abstract space whose logic is guided not by traditional perspective but by the design, which in turn is guided by the nature of the experience I am communicating. So a cramped and discontinuous space is suitable for the evocation of unhappiness or boredom whilst an open and continuous space communicates freedom and an even mood. A collage that is vertically much longer than it's horizontal axis suggests a south to north journey whilst a horizontally long design suggests life moving forward. I employ materials such as metal, fabric, glass, maps, photographs, sea shells and also turpentine and shellac washes, acrylic, oil and really anything which moves the design along.