I usually start from nothing; a blank canvas, paint and “rum courage”.   Optimism. Locked in that moment is a silent empty so unbearable it demands action, psychological effect, transience. Transformation. 

It is the outer boundary for the marks, blobs, splashes, scratches, the stains at the start of my desperate approach to this RAPTURE, a series of paintings in seek of something that is immeasurable, even irrational yet a something that makes visual sense and offers a way out, an escape from ambiguity to a pliant metaphor encompassing light over dark, optimism, hope, opportunity, the force of life. 

Paintings matter. RAPTURE expands upon experience of joy, hope and passion as key concepts.  Indeed, it is a collection of ‘love paintings” like love songs and poems exploring the unconscious as a “mind-scape” for imagining the sense of “belonging” even as the manifestation of a heart’s desire to see and to be that which is desired. 

The spirit of art is imagination.

I want RAPTURE to evoke a transparent after-image, a see-through remembrance of the sweet aspects of a place, which must resonate through the paintings, like a heartbeat, in unwrinkled  expressions of emotion. Effect. A visual realization of the most powerful myth I know -love.

I thought of relating a palette of split complementary (triadic and tetradic) colours to an analogous scheme of soft blues and greens as a key to open the square canvases, composing each vertically from points between the top and bottom edges. This colour pattern is the key, it opens the painting surface into  an  imaginative space, a theoretical arena for something visceral in which the stripping of paint bare to the dust and earth of it’s manufacture could reveal the nature of it’s liquid muck and show the paint as real experience transformed into colour. 

I sought as well, to scrape the paint dry of material associations in the depiction of likeness. The elements of art and the handling of paint as metaphors, when wet, brushed, licked, sprayed, dribbled; colour flowing backwards and forwards, upwards and out to capture the unfolding of ideas and feelings in each composition. Tension and release, an aspiration beyond the mess and chaos and frangible elements of painting’s process to an illumination of content so deep, sensual, so overflowing with a desire, it disrupts how this place feels. 

My optimism is shadowless. 

Two basic principles remain at the centre of gravity in this series.  One is a materialist. It is grounded in the painting process, in skills honed over time, in my working through fragments of  theory and  my speculations about coloration in the use of marks, and for drawing out shapes as a way to display the subtle difference between reflection and  imagination. 

The other is personal. Psychological. Spiritual definitely. Concerned with feelings as a form of energy for achieving vertical focus from a higher perspective in which serendipity like a force of passion offers insight to the fleeting moment. Optimism enfolded in transformation. The technical and the feeling in an instant.

RAPTURE because Art is not dead. And painting is the most explicit manifestation of it’s reality. Painting is this inspirational hand-making process for the purposes of human desire. A means of generating ideas as well as for communicating a sense of awe from moments of stillness and speculation. It is a method for remembering the first season of sight, visual perception, which I am reminded, is itself fragmented and  comprised of unfulfilled expectations that embrace new meaning as an act of worship and renewal -Art exists for itself. 

This series of paintings RAPTURE is what it is.

A changing spectacle of grace, a rule of ethereal, feminized space in which a sense of inner peace propels painting into this profoundly solitary practice, where speculating about beauty is as much a capacity to dream of love as it is a culmination, from which the “peakedness” of experience proceeds.