prints

I print my art onto Somerset paper, using hi-quality Giclee printers. All of my works are contemporary signed limited edition digital art prints. Should you wish to purchase a print please contact me using the form above.

Although I print my digital art to any size, most of the digital art prints on show here were designed to be printed as extra large prints, prints that could hold centre stage in all modern living spaces.

abstract art

What is abstract?

A painting is often defined as an abstract painting if it has no recognisable objects within it. This seems to me, as a contemporary abstract painter, a rather blunt definition of abstract art. I believe that it would be more valuable in attempting to understand abstract art to demonstrate how artists are taught to see and observe the real world, and how it was through the study of representational objects and their depiction that artists were drawn to seeking solutions to more fundamental questions, regarding the nature of sight and reality, and how this resulted in what we term today as abstract art.

Firstly, it should be pointed out that abstract art is not a rebellion against the tradition of painting representational objects, but an outcome of a particular field of investigation - a historic building process. Abstract art is different from pattern. Pattern is simply the repetition of an element.

Historically, a large part of artistic endeavour has been taken up with solving questions of visual interpretation of the real world. It was only after artists had sufficiently understood how to represent the real world, that artists started to question what the real world was anyway.... Take for example a pencil outline of a simple object such as a mug, pretty straight forward really, but is it? When one starts to question the represention of a mug with a series of lines, all one's preconceptions come tumbling down. Firstly, we would represent the body of the mug by two parallel vertically placed lines. One look at a mugs form, however, and one soon realises that there are no edges to represent by a line, instead only a continuous curved surface. The lines we use to represent the body of the mug, are in fact the points on the mugs curved surface at which the curved surface moves away from our view in space, just like the horizon line that we see when looking at a view of a landscape is the point at which the curved body of the earth turns away from our view. Artists use lines in this way to create an illusion of form in two dimensional representation and are called contour lines.

Now let's look at that mug again. If we forget that it is a mug for a moment, what form would best describe its nature? I would suggest a cylinder would. Now we only have to look around, to realise that a cylinder could be used to represent many objects. The legs of a table, for example, a kettle, a bottle, a vase etc. To cut a long story short, artists soon realised that the world could be broken down into a few simple forms, the cube, the cone, the sphere and the cylinder. Having understood this, mugs were no longer mugs and bottles no longer bottles, but abstract forms to be studied, observed, and experimented with. This is fundamentally how abstract art came about.

Artists were now free to investigate in this new art form called abstract art, a new world of atmospheres and feelings and particular lines of enquiry. They could investigate, for example, how shapes overlap one another, experiment with their juxtoposition, play with colors, they could invent new worlds that didn't exist, try to capture tension, create imbalance, suggest anger, etc. Quite simply, a revolution took place.

The power of abstract art is in the way it can open channels to our inner core, our emotions, unlike any representational art can. Abstract art can achieve this as we are stripped of the need to digest and assimilate the representations of real objects, and free as an observer to feel and be taken by the artists away from the expectation of our preconceptions.

Wassily Kandinsky (Russia 1866-1944) was the first artist to break with the past and paint purely abstract paintings. The debate and experiment that lead to the art movement called abstract art, had however, begun earlier and it is possible to trace its roots back to Cezanne (France 1839-1906).

There will always be good and bad abstract art, but good abstract art will be born of a process, the process of investigation and be judged by how well the artist poses questions and presents solutions in his/her paintings. Imagine a room full of furniture cut up into unrecognisable pieces and reassembled into a new world, a world of hope, vision and mystery.