New Work 2022: Something is shifting in my work as an artist… I suppose shifts should be expected.
In the early 2010’s dramatic colour workings, strong forms, banged into my vision with the Sierra de Guara series. From 2014 with my many visits to Poland came music, soothing the makings of the Kazimierz series – Dustin O’Halloran and ‘Lumiere’. More recently, Anouar Brahem’s ‘Le pas du chat noir’ has carried me into a new approach to mark-making.
Brahem’s words from his cd cover stay with me as I work in the studio – feeling for “…the space created by the pause”, and for the process to grow and find definition, I listen for “… the music’s inner song”. Perhaps not quite what Anouar Brahem meant for himself but how those words work for me.
Granted, these are early days in this shift and I’ve got to add in equal measure the words of Wassily Kandinsky, “Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the harmonies, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand that plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul,” (from his book Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 1977 (1914)).
Kandinsky also had a simple way of categorising his 3 distinct types of illustration as ‘impressions, improvisations and compositions’.
I like it. I may borrow those categories for the time being.
