Strangers in the Night Painting

John Charlesworth is an [un]conventional easel painter, employing acrylic paint on canvas or wood. He blends the harsh, unnatural acrylic spectrum to a softer, warmer coloration and tonality, more akin to oils. He never uses raw, unmixed pigment. Even his whites have a small admixture of other colours, principally red and yellow, otherwise they would look stark, cold and unbelievable. His subject matter is largely drawn from his imagination, which he feeds continually with observations from the real world. He favours animals for the intriguing shapes they make and as vehicles for ideas and emotions and such. Advertising and films nowadays are awash with anthropomorphism, much of it very well realised and funny. He is in a similar game, he says, but in the setting of a formal painting there is scope for painterly values missing in those other media, and the possibility for greater depth and gravitas. John says that, "you can more readily convey complex psychological meaning through fixity, cutting out the populist cliché. Messages of desperate hope and redemption, strange truths, can be transmitted to receptive viewers." "There is much to explore in painting and drawing, inexhaustible ways of refinement and improvement. The object for me is always to create something subtle, many-layered and harmonious, in composition and colour. It is much harder than saying it."