It was prompted by a study I made of the same painting during a recent collage workshop run by my local art group, which was brilliant fun. It felt like being a kid again, cutting up/tearing paper and sticking it to card, but it was also amazing how ‘painterly’ it felt, placing a patch of colour and seeing how it related to the other colours around it, then deciding whether to leave it or change it. It also forces one to use bold, bright colours and removes the possibility of muddying them by mixing on the canvas. I think it was Matisse that described collage as “drawing with colour” and after that session it was easy to see why.
I tried to replicate the sensation of collage work during the production of the painting, since this seemed consistent with my current interest in using flat planes of colour to describe form. As well as Matisse’s Green Stripe painting, I was also thinking of the collage work of his later years, as well as of Andy Warhol’s screen prints and, (slightly bizarrely, perhaps,) Blur’s ‘Best Of…’ album cover.
The painting is in heavy body acrylics mixed with sand on stretched canvas and is supplied unframed. It’s monogrammed on the front and signed and dated on a certificate of authenticity on the back.
SUBMITTED FOR EXHIBITION Why Not?