Xanthe Painting

Acrylic on cotton canvas, hand stretched over a 4cm deep museum quality stretcher frame. Sealed with a top layer of protective varnish. Comes ready to hang with dark grey painted wrap-around edges for a clean modern look. The fascination of painting for me lies with the constant tension between planned formality and the maddening, quicksilver, haphazard nature of painting. Spontaneity is calculated with care; combining working in the moment with preliminary sketches and tests. Some of my paintings reveal earlier moments of the composition or traces of renounced decisions, giving both a textural quality to the canvas and a hint to the possibilities of what might have been. I believe it’s important for the artist to title their work. Because my work is fully abstract and not referencing landscapes or emotions but forms and colours, the titles are words that somehow stay with me, and stick as I paint – if they refer to anything it is subconscious but I’d like to share that with the viewer; it gives a point of access and ownership, however oblique. They are paintings to be looked at more than read, exquisite conundrums, puzzles that introduce themselves quietly into the viewer’s consciousness.