Mavericks

Abstract

This body of research work continues my examination of the capacity of abstract painting to express or respond to certain themes or situations. Because the nature of response within abstraction is central to my work, I tend to focus on familiar themes, as a way of examining the responses which result, for example, urban and natural landscapes and the weather in those landscapes. In this body of work, I sought 'to free things up' and introduce new subjects as a way of generating new abstract responses, for example, the seasons, architecture, human behaviour, emotion, music, and other works of visual art (hence the title 'Mavericks'). The format of a square was adopted for all the works to provide a constant against which new formations might arise. What resulted was a series of paintings that, on the one hand, displayed unconventional orientations, spatial relationships and colours while, on the other, appeared continuous with previous work. The impact of this in research terms was that it showed how an established vocabulary of abstract responses could maintain its identity in the face of untypical subject matter, while at the same time extending itself to realize atypical colours and formations. Recognition that this balance was possible – novelty from uniformity in the face of changing subject matter influenced my next research project, Year.