Jay Belmore

My abstract paintings encourage a visual exploration that hinges on landscape and habitats with a fleeting nod to science. In recent work I am attempting to transcribe the vision of other organisms as they look out onto our world. These organic forms are both revealed and concealed amidst layers of more geometric structured forms. The surface of the canvas is activated by the thick impasto and then is controlled or reigned in by the geometric forms. My paintings reveal themselves to me as I paint and are reflections of nature, habitats and memories. By using a combination of these references that are never allowed to fully manifest into recognizable objects, I attempt to maintain an open-ended dialogue with the viewer. This soft focus organic approach must strike a balance with the more structured forms to be successful at creating
secondary interests.

Painting has always been a good medium for me to experiment with the tensions between the real and the abstract, chaos and order, what we perceive and that, which truly exists. The texture and complexity of the surfaces often represent something active, unknown, while the geometric suggests structure and the quantifiable. Always remaining slightly detached from the outcome, I ...