'Beach Huts (Red Door)' 30x40cms oil on canvas 2022
The seventh painting in the 'Beach Huts' series. Colourscapes. Different, fresh-looking, open. Enjoying the seamless switching between the abstract and the figurative, the simplified triangle under the steps critical to this transition. Which stripe is the red door? This is my territory, injecting personal experience into the formalities of painting. This is a painting, this is Whitstable, where I lived as a student at Canterbury College of Art, where I found my freedom in painting through colour.
This is colour, this is drawing, this is composition, this is a love of oil-paint, all the things it can do: wet-on wet, wet on dry, opaque and transparent, thick and thin, weight and lightness, glowing colour - new yellow, new reds - knife, brush, pour, fingers. The decision-making comes from intuition and from the painting: what to leave, what to embellish, creating space and colour relationships and ambiguities. Transformation of the jigsaw below into a painting.
Looking again, I'm enjoying the unintended subversion of reality. The beach huts face the sea, the viewer is on the beach, but the colours of the sea creep in from the right side, behind the beach huts, until a form appears.
in progress