Lockdown Painting 1 Painting

Just before lockdown started, I had a visitor to the studio. He introduced me to some very old Chinese music. One piece in particular stuck in my mind. It followed a river downstream, trying to evoke the different sounds and characters of the water as it progressed from bubbling stream through waterfalls to a meandering river. This somehow tied together many elements of my work and, on blue grounds, I started tracing the course of a leaf as it floated downriver. Many tangents later, I had paintings that seem radically different from those I made before. In truth they still have the same colours and brushwork and tendencies as my previous work, but they have let go of reality, embraced ambiguity and are just a heartfelt conversation with a set of paintings at an abnormal moment in time. The leaf still has the same basic form and colour as when I started, but context and distortion has turned it variously into flowers, fish, ghosts, angels, rocks and whatever the viewer happens to see. The paintings tread a fine line, balancing liberation with constriction, up with down, stillness with movement, earthly with heavenly, and air with water. This painting is made from professional quality oil paints and is painted on a triple primed MDF board. It is unframed.