Abstract Realities

Abstract

The Abstract Realities exhibitions occurred simultaneously at three locations. The first was a single painting responding to van Gogh’s Rain Auvers (1890), exhibited alongside the original in the Impressionist Gallery at the National Museum and Gallery of Wales. The second, held at Howard Gardens Gallery, Cardiff, consisted of a series of paintings, watercolours, drawings and prints responding to rain in a coastal setting. The third, at Flowers Central, London, included paintings and watercolours which were developments of the themes and processes explored in the first two exhibitions. The research carried out for these three exhibitions examined the relation between abstract painting and rain. Rain was selected as a theme because of the ways in which it alters perception of the landscape and introduces elements which promote abstraction in perception. In the first exhibition, I translated the slash-like marks van Gogh had used (to signify rain) into a series of abstract tensions between horizontal stripes and diagonals. Whereas the response to van Gogh promoted tensions, the coastal work produced for the second exhibition had a softer aesthetic, with the experience of rain in a rural location suggesting a more diffused, atmospheric effect. The paintings produced for the third exhibition developed the themes of tension and softness, looking at how the techniques used in the first two bodies of work could be expanded away from their original provenance.