ARTIST STATEMENT
It’s Good Huh? focuses on painterly gesture as a metaphor for the empirical development of human personality. Through the exploration of the materiality of contemporary abstraction, it invites the viewer to contemplate what is essentially a composition in which the artist’s intuition and spontaneity has taken precedence over any formalist contrivance. The inherent challenge of this process lies in the development of non-figurative motifs by employing a somatic approach to painting, in which the very application of paint is reflective of internal experience.
ARTWORK PROCESS
Informed by the work of contemporary abstract artist, Amy Sillman, who looks at ideas of thinking versus feeling through abstract figuration, It’s Good Huh? integrates a conceptual connection to the artist through gestural marks of paint. Following a range of experimental works which explored the notion that ‘all art comes from art’, I automatically created amalgamations of figuration with manipulations of large bodily gesture. Rapid manipulations of the oil medium resulted in a tactile patina, thus enhancing the viewer’s ability to appreciate the formal qualities of abstraction without a clear understanding of explicit meaning behind each artwork.
