The Big Pink Beyond
 
Acrylic paint on 300lb handmade acid-free paper.
Framed 72 x 72cm
 
The "Big Pink" paintings started with a series of synchronous meetings and events, including the accidental ordering of 20 sheets of smooth (hot pressed) extra heavyweight paper and an unexpected week with artist and mentor David Tress.
I don’t usually work on paper, and never smooth paper because it’s absorbent and it’s challenging to work on with wet paint.
But there it was, and I was interested to experiment with it, almost in a 'well I don't like it so it doesn't matter if I ruin it'  sort of way. As this series of paintings has evolved I’ve been astounded by the synchronous events that led to it,  how the paintings flowed, and what they are about.
 
Usually, I would follow the lead of Brian Ruttenburg, a contemporary American artist, when people ask what my paintings are about I would say 'I don't have a proposition, as I have a place'. This series, The Big Pink, blends both proposition and place.
 
 
The Big Pink series is based on the border landscape between North Pembrokeshire and Southern Ceredigion, it's all about colour, energy, and reconstruction. I’m deliberately making paintings that initially don’t resonate with me; they too much, but not enough, false, unfinished, and are quite jarring and uncomfortable.  This uncomfortable feeling they in give is necessary, to push me to then take them apart and reconstruct them into a harmonious and very satisfying whole.
In many ways that feels like what’s happening for me at the moment on a personal level, both in my exterior and interior lives, these paintings resonate with that, and they’re saying something to me that is very encouraging very exciting, and also very comforting.
 
The reemergence of something extraordinarily beautiful and intriguing from something that was the opposite. The constant landscape. The bright colours I'm using in the series enhance, underline that feeling of reconstruction and optimism hope and joy.
 
Bring on The Big Pink - that’s what I say.