Scientific colour tests reveal often it is the saturation of a colour that we respond to rather than the colour itself. A very intense and saturated blue can be much more energizing to the heart and mind than a dark, somber red, defying the common notion that blue calms and red stimulates. The interaction of colors with each other, and the myriad combinations and effects produced by placing different
proportions and spectrums together, can take a lifetime to analyze. Complicating things even more: when you also consider ‘after-image,’ the simultaneous contrast when we look at white after a block of one colour, it then becomes not just about the colors we see visually but the impression they leave behind physically. Colour is a strangely infinite subject crossing emotional and scientific barriers in equal measure.
I have often felt that the act of dyeing thread is deeply related to the act of painting.
When I'm in the dye lab it involves an almost spontaneous gestural movement, working quickly to saturate the white thread with colour; and, much like watercolour painting once the colour is on the thread, it becomes permanent. In September 2018, I began making small abstract paintings on paper for the first time in my life. I began applying the same dynamic of dyeing thread to painting on paper. The aim was to capture the same immediacy and energy generated in the dye lab: intuitive, colour-saturated paintings looking at the relationship between transparency and opacity. Inevitably the language of warp and weft penetrated this work, too: bands of vertical and horizontal colour intersect whilst suspended above floating colourfields. I have long argued that I am – and always have been – a painter; but that I paint with threads, applying the pigment before the cloth is woven rather than adding pigment onto a manufactured woven canvas as a traditional painter. For years I've been interested in two specific things: accidental colour and unconscious colour. It transpires that these two ideas, when filtered through the act of painting, reveal a surprising vivacity and capture a dynamic colourful moment. Over the last three years I have been
generating these new paintings whenever and wherever I can, using the act of painting as a personal meditative process. In complete contrast to the exquisite slowness of the woven artworks, these paintings are punches of spontaneous, emotional colour.
The brilliant lyrical abstract painter, Ronnie Landfield, talks about colour in painting in relation to philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s theory of “hot” and “cool" media which he developed in Understanding Media. Landfield says of his own work: “What matters is the expression of feeling. Being in the moment.” He describes art in general as falling into two categories: the first, fathered by Marcel Duchamp, is “cool and collected,” dominated as that is by the ‘conceptual’ and “minimal”; the second, fathered by Henri Matisse, is “too hot to handle,” reflected as that is by colour, passion, and emotion. Historically, one or the other has usually dominated at a particular time. However, today, things seem to be equalizing. I witness it emerging in the duality of my own work where the act of weaving (technical, methodical – "cool") meets the act of painting (immediate, gestural, emotional – 'hot").
More recently, I have been combining both these qualities through what I call ’Thread Painting.’ This new work explores a technique
I have often felt that the act of dyeing thread is deeply related to the act of painting. When I'm in the dye lab it involves an almost spontaneous gestural movement, working quickly to saturate the white thread with colour.
countryside, in any place outside of a major city
really, it becomes the preoccupation of your life. You are vested, invested, in the property and its success. And that investment extends to the community around you.
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