I wanted to post a little about the painting process that has taken me to my current body of work the Bright Worlds.

Over the past 7 years in the Bay Area, California I have taken a workshops with Nicolas Wilton and Claire B Cotts that really stretched my use of materials, mark making and composition. These are both fantastic painters and colourists and if you ever get a chance to work with them and their process I highly recommend it. Another artist who had greatly inspired my work is Betsy Walton.

 

Most recently I met Deborah Smith, a curator in UK. Deborah suggested I create a series of black and white drawings. Despite my resistance to the idea, I went ahead and filled up a sketchbook. At the end of the process I had a record of fantastic experimental mark making and a new way to explore making compositions.

I  looked at work online at paintings I felt were really successful to pinpoint certain techniques. I started creating colour studies of other artists’ palettes as a way to explore different ways of using colour. I practiced mixing colours I would not have thought to use. All this as a way of expanding my repertoire. Adding neutrals and muted tones to my palette had created more depth and atmosphere in my compositions.

I worked in the abstract, so that I could focus just on the colour and form, and also generate work more quickly, so I scaled down the size of the canvas as well. I was also seeking certain forms to build a vocabulary that would be distinctive. I came across several fantastic books while researching sacred geometry in the library at Goldsmiths University on mathematical curves. I was also looking at the linear forms created by a harmonograph, a fabulous mechanical device that creates geometric forms based on swinging pendulums.

Bright Worlds is a series of vibrant, dynamic colourist paintings using mathematical theories of curves, sacred geometry and platonic solids combined with natural organic forms to create complex, enigmatic, layered space-scapes of line, form, shape and texture.