Painting in Counterpoint

This project is an exploration into the process of painting and problems that emerge during painting. In particular it explores how decisions are made in a continuous process of shifting relations of visual qualities that are themselves, continually differing. In this, it examines how painting comes to a condition of dynamic stasis, where the opposing tendencies towards harmony and dissonance become balanced in a way retains a potential—a sense of latency and imminent movement that gives life to the work. Colour is the basis of this exploration, in both its chromatic and achromatic aspects as they provide the contrast that gives rise to form, shape, texture and an illusion of space in the pictorial plane. The notion of counterpoint provides an analogy to the dialogical process of painting through continual, repeating, action and response until a work emerges in a condition of dynamic stasis. The project comes out of my past practice, and the need (as I perceive it) to problematise the aesthetic of beauty, inventively, so that the familiar order of beauty does not become anaesthetic to our perception, but continues to trigger further invention—to sustain the vitality of painting