Original artwork description:

"Study for Sun Dawn Dance” is an acrylic study painting 20x29cms on 300gm canvas paper. It is set in an off-white card window mount 28x36cms and will fit into a standard frame made for A4 images. The painting is one of several studies made in preparation for a larger canvas painting.
Much of my work is inspired by music and the written word. I take inspiration from music which has an ‘open’ structure. Music that finds its own way through informed improvisation. You have to know the language before you can set ideas free. I try use the parallel structures of such music when making paintings. There is no preconceived notion of how an image finds its way. There is no prescription. Whatever happens is built on experience, impulse, reflective thought and memories. This study takes inspiration from a musical composition by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band and a poem by Don Van Vliet: “Sun Dawn Dance”
“Sun showers danced like dye darker green shadows, light on green leaves played bamboo golden light organ pipes, wooden ‘n’ olden down finicky halls shadows leaped like lizards scaling flower eyes trailing random vines. Tales that curl-ee-cued beans that hung green light berries. Butterfly’s grasp upside down lovely in their rapture. Golden dust, golden winged eels slither apart bleeding life’s light onto the ground ‘n’ quiver down golden light. Corny yellow horns blew petals, stem riddles, bees ride fat honey legged drips. A flowered eye, legend on uh rock she scribbles dew drop pops up in the Sun Dawn Dance”
I have been inspired by the art and music of Don Van Vliet and continue to be inspired by the modernists John Hoyland, Alan Davie, Mark Rothko, Elizabeth Frankenthaler and Gillian Ayres.
Every mark, line, smear or smudge is part of a series of decisions which are constantly under scrutiny. ‘Sun Dawn Dance’ as a painting, is derived from a landscape. This series of paintings are ethereal and are derived from sources which are abstract and transcendental. The sources are lyrical and the settings lie within the aesthetics of emotions and lyrical abstraction. The images develop through a process of spontaneously creating fresh visual melodies over structured backgrounds that form the settings for the compositions. The paintings are intended as glancing episodes composed within illusionistic spaces. I try to paint as automatically as possible. It’s difficult to talk about ‘mark’ and ‘colour’ as an “idea” in a rational way, yet nothing can compare with its infinite possibilities and the multiplicity of its possible meanings. A smudge, a smear, a stroke of colour can be any number of things depending on shape, transparency, density, scale and context etc
I build my paintings in layers of thin, transparent washes of colour combined with and overworked with impasto applications. I use brushes, knives and cloths. I let the paint take its own course. I like the process of painting, so I purposefully leave in the traces of its behaviour such as the marks of knife and brush and the stream and trickle of diluted pigment. I respect and work with the nature of paint.
The painting is shipped in a reinforced card envelope/folder and is cellophane wrapped. Please see pictures.

Materials used:

Acrylic on 300gm canvas paper

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