Diagonal Shift

This exhibition, Diagonal Shift, represents the second installment of a body of work which began with Sympathetic Geometries in 2013. The colour shift in yellows and reds is in-formed by a journey to Andalucia last October.

My work can be described by the terms non-objective, or abstract. I draw inspiration from both the history of abstraction in painting and from the elements of music. Paul Klee focussed his attention on the contents of his paint-box referring to ‘the row of watercolours as a keyboard of colours for improvisation ...,’; the principle of rhythmical linear structures and tonal values being distilled from the artist’s knowledge of the rudi-ments of music.I refer in my paintings to musical forms and structures, such as theme and variation, transposition, rhythm and repetition. My process incorporates strategies which carry a loose set of rules such as are to be found in games; for example, the movements of pieces in chess. Mathematics also plays an important role, notably division as applied to the grid, an underlying drawing or structural element present in my paintings for the past 10 years; and measurement as it recalls the musical elements of rhythm, direction and movement.

My intention in visiting Spain last year was to seek out a greater depth of understanding about the colour and patterns in Islamic tiles, some of which I had first seen a few years earlier in the Paris Mosque and which had been so influential. But instead I discovered something entirely different. I did return with a shift in palette but more importantly with a feeling for the colours beyond themselves. Perhaps it is more a sense in which colour can be pragmatically structural and yet at the same time abstract, so that where juxtaposing colour had previously produced a set of dynamic rhythms and movements it seemed also capable of suggesting a stability, a quiet set of internal reflections.