Painting Journal

This is a series of abstract tachiste works on paper which I create simultaneously with, and as an adjunct to, my representational painting and drawing.

As I work, either in the studio or en plein air, I keep beside me a piece of paper on which I test and mix colours, practice brush-strokes, and blot excess paint. These pieces of paper, the painter’s equivalent of a draughtsman’s scratch pad, are uniform in size (15” x 7”), and are generally black (since I usually paint on black-gessoed grounds). They are inextricably linked to my representational work: they bear the colours and the mark-making of the landscape paintings.

These “colour test pieces”, created essentially as a byproduct of my representational paintings and prints (and thus in themselves “accidental “ works of art), form a record of my art-making process. They are a visual diary, or journal, of the evolution of my work.

Over the years I have been keeping these pieces, feeling that they were somehow special and had their own artistic merit. Created without the intention of ever being a finished work of art, they have a spontaneity, un-preciousness, and un-selfconsciousness that gives them energy and a life of their own. Many of them might stand on their own as successful small abstract paintings.

I now have hundreds of these pieces, and the series constantly grows and evolves with my artistic practice. My preferred way of installing them, as seen in the gallery and studio installation shots at left, is in multiple, for greatest impact. My intention is to create a visual environment in which the viewer is totally surrounded by, and can experience, the pure energy of painting as manifested in abstract colour and brushstroke. I also wish the individual works and the installation as a whole to stimulate thought about the nature of art and creativity, and about the respective roles that consciousness / intentionality and the subconscious / “accidental”, play in the studio.