GLIMPSE OF RUST

As my work progresses, I have become interested in the way accidental juxtapositions of colour take place when commercial paint schemes that are applied, for example to the sides of ships, become corrupted by the colours of ageing.  So, the vivid palettes of ship owners' house-styles designed to be recognised from far away become progressively challenged and eventually vanquished by the reds and oranges of oxidisation, the greens of vegetal growth and the whites of salt, as well as the re-eruption of colours that had been overpainted long ago.

There is a great temptation to get out the colour wheel and map out combinations of saturated colour.  As a way of countering this, and of visiting the opposite extreme, I set out to explore how I could use colour as economically as possible - what would the minimum amount of colour I would need to use to be able to communicate what I wanted to say?  If I could answer this, then subsequent work would be building up in saturation, rather than toning down.
The idea of achieving as much as possible with as little as possible (economy of artistic means) is an essential tool of the artist, and has been explored thoroughly throughout the twentieth century.  I admire Malevich's Suprematist paintings (Black Square or White on White), and I also understand the necessity for someone to have scored 4 minutes 33 seconds of silent music.  But there is no such thing as silence, nor whiteness - and for the same reason, I could not entirely suppress a slight glimpse of rust from my latest piece which I have consequently called Glimpse.  It's a beast of a thing - 1 metre square.
But now, having done a black painting, I feel a little more competent in using saturated colours.

As a postscript to this, I was today asked a very good question by Steve - one of the Bristol students of architecture I work with.  He's seen my website, and wanted to know if stripes on the sides of ships are always horizontal.
Well - not always.  We can think of wartime dazzle painting, or the kind of showy diagonal stripes the US coast guard use.  But mainly they are horizontal, for they signify the various horizontal strata of a ship (lower hull / waterline / upper hull / superstructure and so on).  
As for some of my stripes being painted diagonal on the canvas (like on Glimpse above) - that's probably because the ship is sinking, Steve.