Angear Centre - Recent Paintings 2015

Statement:

To start with one work - "JACKITIN, four sections": it has a particular significance for me. The title relates to an encounter walking along a street, a moment unexpected and bizarre, both visual and aural. A small group of people is sitting on the pavement, and I hear those words - "jack it in." A rapid notation / drawing is made, on a scrap of paper. The memory of that incident stays with me. This kind of situation and response often acts as a trigger or spur to a work, a passing moment of sensory experience that generates initial moves for a painting or drawing. In the continuing work I start with moves, acts that are both a response to previously drawn marks and to a direct intuitive working process. There is always a conflict, a duality, between formality – control and uncertainty – freedom: those issues counteracting, generating energy. The work is an evolving process with continual change and uncertainty. I am aware of an ambiguity of reference and consequent reading. In 2003 I wrote - 'The experience of a mundane object, how it inhabits consciousness – That pale violet plastic fork on the pavement in the accumulated muck by the wall. The blackbird dead on the road pounded by tyres, a flat heraldic trace'. Sources of this kind, connected to aspects of my work, relate to my need to create a sense of disturbance and the absurd. This does not always work, so there is often a kind of 'fight' going on, a need to erase, to layer over, to construct a history. These are aspects of memory conjoined with the physicality of painting, the dynamic of marks and an increasingly intense and often problematic interaction of colour. As time goes by the pressure to keep work open and exploratory continues.

Peter Cartwright
28-04-2015