Your Country Needs Red, Green and Blue

Hands up who likes art that you can’t understand.

Me neither.

Sometimes, next to an artwork, there is a long, earnestly written explanation. And you spend more time reading that than you do looking at the artwork.

So, however earnestly I write, I will try to keep this short.

I am interested in a number of different types of painting; abstract, landscape, devotional. To varying degrees, all my work explores the same themes; strong colour and pattern, chaos and order, storytelling and spirituality. They do it in different ways at different times, but I suspect there are broadly the same themes in most of them.

Red, Green and Blue are unapologetically abstract paintings, pared down to the essentials – paint, pattern, glitter, gold, simple shapes. I like to think of them as fugues of colour, with melodies common to all, performing to each other; and competing for balance and harmony.

They are bright and shiny and sparkle. They are carefully and sincerely made. They are designed not to challenge, but to cheer you up. And couldn’t we all do with a bit of cheering up at the moment?

A visitor to my studio asked: “what are these paintings of?” I thought for a while and answered “I can’t really tell you what they are of, because they are not of anything. But I can tell you what they are about. They are about you, me, everyone else; our experiences, how we feel about them, how we engage or escape”. Isn’t that what artists do? They turn personal perspectives into pictures or environments or music or performance?

There are many opinions on how we should look or examine or listen; Oscar Wilde said that ‘art reflects the viewer, not the artist’; Aristotle proposed ‘that the aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance’. But I think that the one that works best for me is from Picasso, who concluded that ‘art is simply another way of keeping a diary’.

Now, out of the studio and exhibited here as a group for the first time, I present to you, in Red, Green and Blue, some pages from my own diary. I hope you will look, consider and enjoy.

New Era Theatre is at St George’s Centre, Andover Road, Wash Common, Newbury, RG14 6NU.