Spring

CONTACT ORIGINAL INK GALLERY  

This series of artworks is a cycle of four images representing the four seasons. It is also a homage to one of my all time favourite painters, Howard Hodgkin, who died in 2017. All four artworks have been based on two components – mark making and vivid colour. In some aspects of the images, line is almost completely replaced by colourful patches and rolled areas of flat ink. The marks frequently take the form of large dots, introducing a third and final component of daubs and blobs. Clumsy brush strokes and scrawled cursive marks are colourfully mixed in with doodled shapes and angry scribbles, forcefully controlled in a compositional balancing act of painted elements and marks. The tension between the printed graphic qualities and the harshly painted linear strokes and rich vivid colour of paint is central to the impact and emotional spirit of the work. 

This runs parallel to a tension between intellectual cultural history and intuitive emotional expression enacted in Hodgkin’s paintings. The four seasons are symbols of the natural cycles of life and everything between birth and death. They are also a historical theme that has consistently appeared in poetry, music and painting. No two years are the same and every season is different. In this series, I wanted to record and capture the memory of the four seasons during my final year in Africa in 2008.

The idea for the cycle began while I was living in South Africa. The light in the southern hemisphere seems a lot sharper than in the north and therefore the colours in the landscape, or in a garden, are far richer and much more vivacious. In order to capture the four seasons, the colours in this series are of the highest saturation I could print. The appearance of vivid colour and rapid movement throughout the images dramatically counterbalances the sense of verticality created by the long brush strokes. The darker tones have been applied more sparingly throughout the images in the cycle to highlight marks and texture and add more depth of field to the composition.