I promised to look back at more pieces from my past portfolio today and here we have three of them. These are Purple, Green and Orange and are the first of the spatial-paintings which I chose to install into a space. At this time I was experimenting with how the paintings worked in “space” and was considering some concerns which I had about having the “backs” of the paintings on show. I decided to try to address this situation by doing paintings where only the canvases themselves were presented to the observer and the stretchers were installed behind the false walls of a specially created space. The outcome of this was that I realised that I actually liked having the backs in view and that in some cases, like Yellow, it particularly enlarged the dramatic effect of approaching the painting from the back. But the above paintings became something else quite different, opening up new ideas about large-scale installation and gave me new directions to explore. If anybody has any thoughts or comments about these pieces or ideas I would love to hear them, so please contact me as always.

Of course the thing to bear in mind about all the spatial-paintings is that they are created very much with a concern for the “live” observer, to be actually experienced first hand and not through a photo as they are here,  I therefore make no apologies for the somewhat “hollow” feel that these images impart. Purple for instance, far left, is a painting not unlike Red and Yellow, in that it is cylindrical and you enter it. In this case it is 3/4 of a cylinder and you enter through a doorway into a “deep-purple” painted environment, very dark and intense, an experience which is  impossible to convey in a photo. Likewise, Orange, is actually an offset conical canvas which recedes from the observer through a circular hole in the wall, although in photos it appears to be a graduated, painted disc, hung on the wall. It is this need for the first-hand experience of the observer which has become a critical feature of all my installation work, as I will attempt to show in more works to come from the portfolio.

Sorry if this post seems a bit hurried, it is quite a nice clear morning here so I think I may go for a walk up the mountain, so look out for more new photos over the next few days. If you would like to talk in more depth about any of my work please contact me.