Friday, September 22, 2023

A Few Abstracts from the Archive

For a stretch of time between the years 2000 until about 2015 I painted mostly in the abstract style, including surrealism and a branch of surrealism I called doodleism. These paintings use elements of both styles. Surrealism is a variation of landscape, but using a dream like approach to depict reality. I always kept a small element of the horizon and some trees in order to create little pockets of reality. In the above painting there is a smidgen of tree and blue horizon showing towards the bottom left. Its hard to date these paintings exactly, but the 'scrawl' signature, which is cut off in the image due to my scanner size, indicates that it was painted around 2006 onwards. I like the black/yellow fade in the central element, it was a deliberate backwash to create a feathering effect.   

Lost and Found, watercolour, 11 x 15" cold press, 2009 (No. 1393)

At the time I was enthralled with ultimate frisbee, a field sport involving up to 14 players and a frisbee. In the painting there is a floating field with 14 miniature players ready to play, on player is holding the disk up which signified ready to the other team. Once they put their hand up the disk is thrown and game begins. The familiar trees and blue sky ground the image in reality, while the organic-metallic and tree forms provide the dream-like quality. In the catalogue I had this one as 2008 but noticing the block signature with PJ, puts this closer to 2002 I think. I vaguely remember painting this one but not much. It was probably a derivative of floating cathedrals, an unfinished large watercolour. I tend to paint with brighter colours and more contrast nowadays and  do pure abstract (palette cleansers) or pure doodleism from lab book doodles.

Floating Ultimate Field, watercolour, 8 x 15" cold press, 2002? (No. 1611)

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