Colour

Although colour has always been the primary element in my paintings since the 1960’s, it has not been seen in it’s more emotional state in my work after the late 1970's until relatively recently. The works which I painted from then, after I moved from Wales to Nottingham, were founded on colour harmonies and combinations which loosely followed theories set out by Josef Albers and Johannes Itten in their treatises on colour. These exercises in the uses of complementary and simultaneous contrasts, the use of tetrads, tertiary colours, close harmonies and chromatic greys, became systems by which I exercised my use of colours at that time in my career. By its nature this kind of response to colour tended to remove and replace any emotional and responsive action of events upon the finished work with theoretical doctrines - however colourful and exciting the result I achieved was. This was the case until the paintings of late 1977 when a more pointillist character returned to my work following the principles of neo-impressionist technique adhered to many years earlier. So I had returned to a method of applying paint to the surface which I had not used for nearly thirty years. Not directly for its divisionist possibilities but for its formal and surface qualities alone as can be seen in the illustrations below.

                         250  Nattyxne          2008                                                                             252  Storsjön  2008                                                                                 247  Nattglød     2008