Finding Joy -- Artist Statement for micky renders
A few years ago I reached a tipping point in my life and sought a personal shift through my art practice. The most visceral and expressive element of art is colour and as such, I began to immerse myself in a body of work using colour as a singular visual force.
Gradually everything else fell away and the result was a minimalist approach to painting in this series that I call “Finding Joy”. Glazing layer after layer of paint, the action of the brush across the surface became rhythmic. The physicality of the blending became a more important part of the process over the pursuit of form. There was a shift from looking outward to looking inward.
My ongoing interest is in exploring life forces and a sense of universal connection through my art. The beauty and vitality of colour is evocative by association. Spaces of “redness” or “greenness” with little inflection elicit energy and create an expansive presence. Colour has the power to evoke psychological, physiological and symbolic effects: colour as light, colour as emotion, colour as temperature…energy…atmosphere. Colour is a universal language: it draws us in, it is sensual, it is natural, it can heal.
Throughout this period I have reacquainted myself with Colour Field Painters[1] of the late 1950-70’s. Evolving from Abstract Expressionism, these artists saw the role of art was not to report on the visible, but to reveal the unknown. They shared too, the belief that paintings that resembled nothing pre-existing could have the presence, authority and associative richness of other real things in the world. Colour Field Abstraction can seem, depending on our sympathies, either inexplicably magical, or almost mechanical[2]. Many contemporary artists continue to be informed by this movement.
[1] Artists such as Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Adolph Gottlieb, Hellen Frankenthaler, Hans Hoffman, Robert Motherwell, Jules Olitski, Kenneth Noland, Agnes Martin and Frank Stella in the USA and in Canada Jack Bush, Fernand Leduc, Guido Molinari, Yves Guchier, Francoise Sullivan, etc.
[2] Wilken, Karen. Colour as Field: American Painting 1950-75. The American Federation of Arts in association with Yale University Press, 2007.