Night Spot Print

STATEMENT Artists Films - CHAOS (Gnossienne No.1) Every year Ginny and I go down to the Goose Fair to walk around and soak up the atmosphere, smell the air, see the spectacle. It's a rough, noisy, angry, smelly thing. It stimulates and excites but it doesn't satisfy. I have photographed it many times and tried, and failed, to paint it with traditional materials. Knowing that digital video and computer editing programs were becoming available at affordable prices, I felt that video would be the way to capture the chaotic experience, to reveal the underlying beauty of the modern fairground. Painting with light. Chaos is, of course, not what we have here. The title is convenient but ironic. What we are presented with is the opposite of chaos - symmetry. Where the fairground is brash - a cacophony of visual and aural noise, - Here we have a nocturne - Sympathy, music, light and movement together, grace, order, beauty. Just as the Impressionist painters sought the impression of light and the Futurists of speed, and just as they took their new technology (still cameras) to the races, the boulevards, the circus, the fair, so here a painter is again using the latest technology to create visual art. This time, though, no rushing back to the studio to paint in oil colour from the photographs, Here the light itself is the painting, the pigments move, pulsate, blend. The colours spin and rotate, come and go, erupt and subside but they never stand still. Order from Chaos, harmony from discord. The artists remit - Simplify, reveal, portray. Impressionism meets futurism at the speed of light - - A Symphony of Color, Whistler would have approved.