Opening Night: Thursday 1 November 6-8pm
GALLERY HOURS: Wed - Sun 12-5pm>
Artist’s Statement
This series of paintings continues a fascination with the ordinary and mundane everyday glimpses. The work is an eclectic mix of service stations, airport terminals and shopping centres with a sprinkling of urban and suburban imagery. The paintings capture a moment in time, simple and ordinary that we often take for granted, with social or personal narrative arising from each individual scene. The camera was a contributing factor in this work, where images are often captured at a glimpse, in a fleeting moment.
The light, natural and artificial is a linking factor; the exterior landscapes are carried by specific light and time of day, the interiors with their strange light of fluros and their glow in the night of the ‘servos’.
There is an ongoing research and fascination in the painting process itself. Some paintings have been painted in the old masters tradition using a tonal grisaille under-painting with colour glazed on top. Following my long involvement with ‘en plein air’ painting, working directly outdoors, all the work in this show has been painted in the studio, ‘alla prima’ (in one session), in the case of the old masters approach, extended ‘alla prima, where each of the two stages are done directly in one session. I want to capture the narrative related to a particular moment in time, keeping a freshness and simplicity of meaning without changing and adding intellectual process and refinement by subsequent layers or days of painting.
These paintings continue the experimentation with an oil painting technique attributed to the old masters prior to the use of solvents or the use modern chemical paint additives and mediums. Aside from some modern synthetic pigments, the entire process is fully organic, without any toxic or solvent substances, putting the studio alchemy back to full artistic control.
