Bio Mass: recent paintings by Brian Cheeswright

About

I make painterly paintings, however good or bad that may be.
The paintings and drawings are on the whole small and created quickly, with the aim of capturing a certain mood or fleeting vision. My method has been largely intuitive.
Over the last decade or so I’ve been working my way through Modernism, really. Starting out being a wholly figurative artist, and then slowly discovering what paint as a thing-in-itself can do, until finally reaching the point where the subject has become a prop, and you end up with full-on abstraction. A journey of finding out what I really want to paint. Of course, that reading of my work is too coherent and systematic. The narrative of my development has seen a lot of to-ing and fro-ing. Hence the body of work presented.
At this point and going forward it is a matter of consolidating what I have learned. I keep coming back to the figure, partly because the possibilities of abstraction are almost too open-ended, while the human body, or more specifically the human character, provides an ideal lens through which to plant my ideas: puppets on a stage for me to manipulate, if you will.
Though, as I say, a certain amount of intuition and deliberately wrong-footing myself to reveal surprises, is part of what keeps me painting. My oeuvre does reveal certain tendencies and preoccupations, which tend to recur.