Cadmium sea garden
2011,
oil, acrylic and oil crayon on canvas,
183 x 152cm
Curator Statement
Now this is a joyous picture, or I hope people see it is that way. I said earlier on, I’ve been diving and snorkelling for very many years and around about this time I made a series of paintings called Sea Garden: a viridian one, an emerald one, a mauve one, and this one, a cadmium yellow one. So you can use the sense of being under the water really just as a starting off point to make the paintings. I mean under the water doesn’t look precisely like this but it gave the impetus for this kind of painting. Again, you have to work on parts of it rather swiftly and other parts you might have it hanging around the studio for a while and then just do a little bit on it. Quite large pictures, about the fact that under the water is as much like a garden as it is like an aquarium and a painting that I hope will give the viewer lots and lots of things to find within it. It should be the painting, the overall colour of the painting, the joyousness of the yellow, is hard to resist, but that is not enough: it has to be something that you can find more and more and more things in. As I said before for as long as I’m snorkelling and diving, wherever it may be in the world, being under the water will be a constant source of inspiration.
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