LIGHT/DARK/DARK/LIGHT,

Globe Gallery, 57 Blandford Square, Newcastle-upon-Tyne,

19.9.2014 – 31.10.2014

works from this also shown at:

Whose Afraid of red, Yellow and Blue

OBS Gallery, Tonbridge, Kent

20 September 2016- 6 November 2016

Gallery text:

John Gage in his book, Colour and Culture said that colour is the most important non-verbal communication.

An all-female cast of characters whose dress hints at a variety of meanings and possibilities, singly, in pairs and in groups act out obscure dramas in pictorial spaces that hint at the exotic, the domestic and the dis-located.

I read the Whitby born writer Storm Jamieson’s (1891-1986) autobiography, Journey from the North some time after I had made the studies for Costume Drama, (and the subsequent series of large oil paintings shown at the Globe Gallery, Newcastle, 2014), and found that her description of the process of writing her novels elegantly described how I had informed and made these paintings: 

The change of milieu produces its own complexities and depths of meaning, one change involving another, and another, until the original chain of events is completely overlaid. The personages move farther and farther from their point of origin and become truly autonomous, and are enriched, complicated, changed in depth, by the working on them of circumstances’.

And, of course, the fusion of all these many elements is fed and animated by personal memories and emotions entering spontaneously at every level.

Likewise the figures and pictorial spaces in my paintings are drawn from a variety of times and sources including the paintings of Francisco Goya,(1746-1828) Edouard Manet, (1832-83) and from Persian miniatures, (C15 and C16). The pictorial spaces that the figures inhabit are sometimes suggested by the figures or come from some of my previous paintings, other spatial ideas come from paintings such as those by the American Abstract Expressionist painter Adolf Gottlieb, (1903-74). 

Press:

Review by David Whetstone, The Journal, 14 October 2014.

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