"Pull" Painting

Maevaughn Chiu ~ b1966


My interest lies in the relationship between colour and form and the emotions they elicit from the viewer. My paintings have a distinctive aesthetic, they are the culmination of my life and my relationship with the world through art.

The shapes and forms are part of my internal visual library. Images collected from my earliest memories of living with my parents and sisters, moving between Malawi, a village in West Yorkshire and South Sudan. Then as an adult in the Solomon Islands, Hong Kong and Canada. All these diverse cultures and aesthetics feed into my work. Memories of feelings and places. Drawing on my relationship with art and design, I often use shapes that I associate with particular chapters of my life, as an aid to the indistinct memory of the sensation.

The images occupying my focus at the moment are from my early days at art college in Yorkshire in the 1980s. The imagery of postmodernism, Richard Rodgers, Ettore Sottsass and the 'Memphis' collective, and Missoni. This, combined with the art books that were a constant companion in my childhood. Victor Passmore, Barbara Hepworth, Salvador Dali and Agnes Martin.

I use small sketches and cut-outs to loosely compose a painting, then paint intuitively, meticulously refining both background and forms until I feel a deep connection with the work. I allow the colours and biomorphic and human-made shapes evolve, creating vignettes that explore the relationships of the forms. Using acrylic, vinyl and household paint, layering glossy, transparent glazes and matt, opaque fields or lines. I explore the differences in surface, immersing myself in the sensation of smoothly applying the paint, in a meditative way, repeating the right curve or brush stroke to build an image. The flow of the piece is always at the back of my mind.

I am drawn to modernist paintings in galleries. The minimal shapes are frequently framed in ornate traditional frames. I love the visual dialogue between these two. The Frame lends a gravitas to the simple forms, the final object being a fusion of two visual languages. I source old frames, painting a new work to fit, creating a new and 'desirable' object.

There are many different themes in my work, about our relationships, our environment, our history and the connectedness of everything. As my work draws on diverse cultural aesthetics, I hope that the viewer will notice the thoughts and feelings that arise when they look at the work.