I've been working as an artist for over 30 years now and for most of that time I have devoted myself to developing my own style of abstract painting. Paintings are illusions. Paint is applied to the flat surface to create the illusion of form and space often to depict something real. My Abstract illusions, which are often confusing and difficult to ‘read’, allude to forms and spaces but ones that invite interpretation by the viewer. Interpretations that will, because each viewer is different with different life experiences, be individual and different each time the painting is viewed. No one interpretation will be any more valid or correct than any other; there is no right or wrong answer to the puzzle that the image may pose.
Most of my paintings begin life as a figure drawing or life studies. These studies go through many stages of development before becoming the final abstract image that is transferred to the canvas. The figurative nature of the early drawings and development drawings does not mean the final work should be read as being figurative, far from it, but there is an organic quality to the abstract paintings even when hard edged shapes are used.
Colour is used to add mood and character to the forms that collide and mingle on the surface, and again, different viewers will feel differently about colour and will, therefore, feel differently about the work. I am not trying to create any one particular mood in the viewer mind and my own mood when working has very little influence on the final painting as the work develops over many days even weeks or months.
Just as music will create images and mood within the mind of the listener by the combination of sounds created by the instruments, sounds that are not copies of the sounds in the real world, I am hoping my work, without copying the real world, will create moods and new imaginings in the viewer.