'Being and Nothingness'

About

“Every child is an artist. 

The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” 

- Pablo Picasso

An inevitable aspect of the development of intellectual realism in young children is the gradual separation of the conscious and subconscious in the creation of art. Colour and form give way to stick people and box shaped houses. Soon enough even these simple yet interesting images disappear, replaced by layers of detail and an increasingly conscious interpretation of the world around us. 

This exhibition features a series of twelve oil pastels created during the two years from 2022 to 2023. Inspired in part by the existentialist ideas of Jean Paul Sartre, each pastel captures a moment of reflection and offers the viewer an insight into the artist’s ongoing creative journey. Many of the oil pastels in this exhibition include a written streaming of subconscious on the reverse. These passages are generally completed in one sitting. Devoid of the interference of conscious thought, the sentences emerge onto the page, and the end result is a prose which ranges from the obscure to the poetic. 

Mandalas borne out from the quiet of the early morning, the pastels also represent an antithesis to the oil paintings which come into being in the afternoons over many months, full of animation and vibrancy to a backdrop of loud and powerful music. The four paintings included here, which progress from pure abstraction through to the emergence of figurative imagery, invite the viewer to contemplate their own path in isolation, from the nothingness of the past to a future that as yet remains unrealised.