Category: Refraction-ist Style

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This abstracted landscape or ‘refractionist’ work sees the light broken down into light filled colour segments or ‘blocks’ to create an almost pre-perceptual  image. The foreground dark reds are juxtaposed against the light-singed orange and lushy leafy greens to suggest a green distant solace from the scorching heat, with the darker blues suggesting a progressively deepened experience of this respite and solace from the sun’s baking rays. Thus we see a transition from scarlety red via the purply blue path through the burnished, charred-edged  oranges and fruity greens to the darker recesses of the oil ink blues like a colour spectrum from hot to cool. Again another use of the refractionist motif. Not only are my paintings often refractionist in terms of e.g. light coming through materials as through tree leaves, shedding light ‘stain glass-like’ but in this case symbolising a progression of temperature and the experience of this variation in heat.   The rich boiling bloody reds in the foreground also contrast to the purply blue colours of the path. This spreading of light across these different temperature textures also has a ‘lava lamp’ effect’ as if the oily colours slide across the canvas. The path’s purply blues suggests a transition, a comfortable inviting passage to the cooling shade of the far trees. The far ice cool blue contrasts from the initial, foreground liquidly purples, which in their calm serenity suggest relief from the distress of the exasperated, bad tempered heat.

The top of this painting has echos of Cezanne in it; quite accidently I am sure. My husband is a devotee of Cezanne but I have always failed to see the attraction. While in Paris, my husband dragged me reluctantly to an exhibition of Paul Cezanne’s earlier, transformative work. I was far from impressed I must admit, trying desperately to ‘get into it’ especially as my husband looked almost despairing at my inability to ‘get it’.     Most of the ‘classics’ were missing for a start – we wandered through the actual pictorial representation of years of Cezanne’s attempts to find ‘his style’. This was quite encouraging in the end, to think even the ‘greats’ have to delve and dig to unearth  the technique that most expresses their artist soul.    It was reassuring to realise even Cezanne struggled to find his artistic voice. There is hope for us all. I was quite prepared to leave the gallery with this reassurance that maybe even for me… maybe one day. In the final couple of rooms there was a beginnings of the art ephiphany that my husband must have experienced before. Cezanne was beginning to illustrate how we see, not paint what we see with accuracy. He was almost painting the act of ‘seeing’, the experience of it . The breaking down of light, colour, form into ‘patches’ which then all sort of ‘added’ up to the final image; this was illuminating. Why had I not seen this before?

It was a perception in the making according to my husband, who researches neuroscience and is fascinated by perception, how it is constructed. But here we have a painter, an artist, nearly a hundred years ago showing how perceptions is built, via these  ’patches’ 0f colour and form. He added that these ‘patches’ are more representative of what and how we see than some other painting of something which is dead to the experience of viewing it. A facsimile of the image. Expression thus may not just be about the feeling or experience of seeing something but a representation of how we see it. How could I have been so blind!? Thus I now paint to express how one feels while ‘perceiving’ the movement of the heart that accompanies the taking in through the senses. The exhilaration of seeing and perceiving. The wonder in the everyday, the extraordinary in the ordinary.     Perceiving as a ‘dynamic’ act – an act most ‘vital’ not ‘completed’, finished or done with but being done. Not sunk into canvas  or laden with inertia but  alive , invigorating, changing, in construction, moving.  Not categorised but fluid, still being defined, joyful and light not itemised and final. Not an interpretation but being intrepretated.   Active not passive. Now not then. In the present not past tense. Constantly evolving in the moment. Presently present. Here, now, inaffable. Transcending.  This what I hope to achieve on this long  journey to expressing oneself. To learn how to transport the viewer to the now, to a vaguely remembered, or imagined even, place in the heart.  To the obscurely wonderful feeling of being nowhere else but here.