Manchester Menorah (with beeswax candles) Print

I hope you enjoy the following Popstraction. It’s part of my artistic Platonism. This is an intuitive responses to Plato's theory of the Forms, through art and abstraction. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato used the notion of Forms as a way to explain what property the same kinds of objects had in common. The “Third Man” criticism of the Forms is that if we need a Form for what is common between all things – eg Cats, or Red objects, then what is common between the (Red) objects and the (Red) Form. The alternative is Nominalism where we just recognise the similarity instantly and nothing is common between them. I try to solve this criticism by making a tension between the objects and the Form. I ask how far away from the object can we make an image and yet still recognise the image as representing the object. In the move between seeing the image and seeing the object I hope that we can glimpse our Platonic Forms. To make us consciously link to the Form – or our idea of what it is we are looking at. The work is philosophical art and part of my on-going experiments in line and colour - blurring the boundary between outline and colouring, drawing and painting. Some of the paintings combine inlines and outlines in a series of art investigations. My favourites are the faces with figures as features and the Greek Myth works that go back to the origins of art replacing “outlines” with “inline” skeletons. The idea was to make the work as abstract as possible and still be recognisable as an object. And then to go further and distort the object and for it still to be recognisable. I hope that you enjoy the resulting paintings and sculptures. Anthony David Padgett – June 2021