Posts Tagged ‘fluorescent colour’
Science fiction colours?
It was only afterwards, in the ‘editing’ stage, that I started to think of the colours as somehow science fictionish
Scifi1, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″
Another quick slow
A variation of a pattern that looks visually ‘quick’ at first sight.
However, it can become verrrry slow…
Quaduo 2, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″
When you take your time with it.
Only quick at first sight
Whilst this pattern looks visually ‘quick’ it is really only quick at first sight. Prolonged study elicits multiple interpretations.
Quaduo, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″x10″
How to encourage the viewer to linger a while, that’s the question.
A few days ago I delivered one of my new paintings to the Old Lockup Studio in Cromford, ready for our pop up show Salon 1, on 18 August. Whilst I was there I tried to persuade Clay Smith and Rachael Pinks that my work took only a few minutes to make and that anyone could do it. When Rachael suggested that there was more thinking time than I was letting on I dismissed her comment, genuinely believing that I did very little of that. Since then I have become more aware of just how long I spend viewing and thinking (sometimes with little or no internal dialogue and sometimes with lots of it – two very different modes of ‘viewing’). Because I enjoy it so much, time flies and I hadn’t been noticing the passing of time. It turns out that it is hours a day, looking, thinking, editing by which I mean turning canvases around to see different variations and paying attention to what changes and how the colour behaves. Early mornings, sometimes I find that I have spent an hour without realising that I had been doing anything it all. And it is through these time distorting experiences that I come to appreciate that these patterns are indeed much slower than they may seem at first sight.
Duo Fluoro
Combining two fluorescent diptychs to create a quad that is also a duo, in that it ‘repeats’ once horizontally.
I had no conscious intention of making something in the colours of a warning signal (whether natural, as in animals with highly coloured marks for warning off potential predators or artificial, as in signs on emergency vehicles or architecture for example on bridges) but I had for some time experienced being impressed at how yellow works in such signs, and it must have found its way into my process.
Gestalten!
This pattern is somehow both simple and complex at the same time…
Attention Shift YPB, 2012, Acrylic on Canvas, 10″ x10″
I am intrigued by the way that the attention shifts from one gestalt to another, and especially the oscillating interpretations of figure and ground. Meditate on it for a few minutes and the colours seem also to transfer due to the ‘after imaging’ that ensues.
Eye Light and Sight Excite
Two tiny new paintings (diptychs) 6″ x 12″, acrylic on canvas: Eye Light and Sight Excite
…seeking to make a better show of what I could see going on when I made this big painting last year.
The fluorescent pink and orange seemed to interact with the yellow and white to shift them towards yellow/green and blue/grey. It was plain as day when I was painting it, but not always so easy to see once it was presented for viewing. The light makes a difference, the more daylight the more clearly the colour shift is seen. But I also had the sense that the scale, though dramatic, and I like that, may have been getting in the way, because the more distance I got the more likely I was to see the colour interactions. So, I decided to have another go with a different design and reduced scale.
You don’t really get the experience in a photo but I hope that the small scale means that you get drawn in and that means you study, and that means you get the optical effect that these paintings are partly about.
