Out of the Blue Print

128 X 128 X 4cm, pigment and oil on canvas, original work. Through my series of paintings, I continue to construct a visual language which is constantly explored and refined. I feel harmony and calmness abound in this composition. The beauty of the squares inside squares, drawing the eye inwards, and from one side of the canvas to the other in a seemingly effortless way, adds to the tranquillity of the space it fills. The use of powdered pigment with its intensity of colour, coupled with its soft powdery surface, gives an effect similar to the tips of butterfly wings. ABSTRACT PAINTINGS SERIES I am a conceptual artist. My work is urban-based and future-led with roots firmly based in the traditions of 20th Century abstraction. My ultimate aim is for the spectator to see something different each time they happen upon a canvas, seeking not to lecture or dictate, but probe, inspire and stimulate, to ultimately share in my joy of creativity. My palette is restricted to mainly three hues of blue. This has led to a tantalising range of colours and has become the pulse of my paintings. Blue is such a timeless colour; it is full of contradictions. It is historically the colour of royalty and nobility, the Virgin Mary, cops, pornography, and melancholy. It’s the colour of the sea and the sky and of deep shadow, and cold bruised skin; the denim of cowboys as worn by film stars and pop stars, and the “Mao suit” of Chinese peasants. It also became the colour of heaven; it is an open door to the soul, an infinite possibility becoming tangible. Above all, I love blue for its energy. It seems to assert itself in our emotions. Its joyousness is capable of lifting our lives to another level. I use mathematics as my main way of achieving compositional harmony. My focus lies on creating new forms, planes, shapes and colour out of a logical system of spacial calculations, and by using different colour compositions, I attain a variety of seemingly simple but complex paintings. My concerns are with form rather than literal representation and my inspiration is taken from the elements I see on a daily basis in urban life such as the grids of the streets and contemporary architecture and how the light reflects off glass, steel and water. The mathematical variables are the frames within which I work and make sense of “how he urban world is put together”. I work mainly on a series of paintings, three or four at a time (as of February 2021, I am currently on my 9th series) with each one interrelating to the others. I feel this verse from T. S. Elliot’s 1925 “The Hollow Men” sums up my emotions whilst working on these paintings: "Between the conception And the creation Between the emotion And the response Falls the shadow"