This textured Acrylic painting on canvas features an Ashby's Banksia on a green table and is from my recent series of works titled Intersect. (See below for further reading). It has been finished with a varnish and professionally framed in a timber box frame
INTERSECT
For as long as I can remember I’ve been interested in the relationship between art and design. When I commenced my formal studies back in 1991, they were thrown into the same basket but I feel like they are wildly different subjects.
Having studied and practiced both disciplines, my work sits somewhere between the two, and it’s not always a place I feel comfortable. I have an ongoing internal tussle about where my art belongs. Every now and then I have to down my usual tools and set up a traditional still life scene that I studiously render in oils to prove to myself that I’m a ‘Real Artist’.
The intersect series is something I have been working on for a couple of years now, it’s about letting go; an admission and acceptance of my design background and a conscious merging of both disciplines into a body of work.
Still life is my favourite genre, yet these flowers in vases are clearly not painted from life. They are informed by synthetic cubist ideals and early pop art, and are unconcerned with form or perspective. Pictorial flatness is a naturally occurring theme in my work after many years designing logos and icons for single colour output, and the restraints of a long print design career have unlocked a deep appreciation and respect for the pleasure of applying the paint itself.
The works in this series explore both painterly and linear techniques, and are characterised by a central line through the composition that serves as the water line, refraction and intersect between the background, vase and surface. This technique somewhat mimics the imaginary grid structure I would use to set type and images in a traditional page layout.