|
Having spent most of my working life teaching and / or providing for basic, particular, even sophisticated needs of others, time available for painting has been sporadic at best, with often very long periods of non-painting at worst, e.g. 1965 1990. My thinking about painting as a sensory experience with an habitual visual awareness of the various environments lived and worked in during such periods, somehow kept alive a kind of magic creative discipline within me. This is activated whenever I now make the first application of paint to a freshly prepared surface.
Lack of continuity, however, has resulted in such a diversity of work that it is almost impossible to establish any easy relationships between one painting and another. On the other hand I admit to a preference for a divergent approach - to painting at least, rather than a convergent one. The former opens up endless possibilities, the latter seeming to constrict and, finally perhaps, to pinpoint only one outcome. (More suited to, say, research in the field of particle physics). Now that I have more time for painting, one might just detect some intraconnectedness in the more recent works.
Léon Degand once wrote, The ways of abstract painting are not easy ones... They have been followed, nevertheless, for nearly a hundred years. Abstract painting is alive and well and need never die, because the environments in which we live and work, be they natural or man-made, or both, teem with abstract elements as an inexhaustible source of visual information to supplement that already learnt from knowing how to look in order to see, and not just to notice in passing.
When I put a mark on my chosen surface, it has a shape and colour, a visual weight, and also a relationship with the rest of that surface. If further shapes are added, the relationships increase, dependent on many variables, and according to my own personal sensibilities. There is no subject as such. It is what I do, and how I do it, that tells me how to proceed. Up to that point, I have few, if any, pre-conceived ideas. It is by painting that I learn that the paint I use has a life of its own, I learn how to control it, and how to bring the total to an acceptable conclusion, if only for myself. To add more or take away would diminish the acceptability of the whole. That responsibility is mine as chief arbiter.
On the gallery page there is a selection of photographs of my work, dating from 1958 to September 2002. It will be updated from time to time. If you wish to discuss my work please contact me by e-mail.
mailto:jroyart@hotmail.com
|
