Obsessed With Watercolour

The painting becomes still.

The flow continues.

Mr. Wackman

A finished artwork freezes those movements unnaturally, yet the experience contained within the work remains alive.

Perhaps we are much the same. We are not completely fixed things. We continually absorb, adapt, respond and change according to the currents around us.

The Ideal Natural Unnaturalness

The Architecture of Flow: The Ideal Natural Unnaturalness.

This body of work moves between observation and abstraction, stillness and movement, control and chance.

For me, creating is a search for the point where conscious decision begins to fall away and intuition takes over. Water changes direction. Pigment finds unexpected paths. Lines interrupt fluid surfaces. Images emerge, disappear and return in another form.

Re-Creation

I often return to images rather than accepting them as permanently finished.

Reworking becomes another form of growth. An image can be reconsidered, reinvented and recreated while still carrying traces of what it once was.

Internal Weather

I think of paintings like this as a kind of internal weather: something constantly forming, dispersing and reorganizing itself.

Energy

Here, recognizable form begins to give way to energy.

Loops, stains, scratches and sweeping colour allow the movement that normally hides beneath representation to come closer to the surface.

An Unrepeatable Palette

Colour is something I build rather than simply select.

Transparent washes, earth colours, greens, oceanic blues and more intense passages meet, overlap and change as the painting develops. The resulting palette belongs to that particular moment and that particular work.

From Figurative to Abstraction

The distance between realism and abstraction may be smaller than it first appears.

A body becomes lines. Water becomes colour. Wind becomes gesture. A figure gradually becomes rhythm.

Pigment Finds Its Path

I allow paint to bleed, pool, overlap and occasionally resist my intentions.

Those moments are important. They remind me that the surface and materials have their own physical logic.

Natural / Unnatural

Painting nature is inherently strange.

Something continuously changing becomes fixed to paper. Time is stopped. Movement is preserved.

This is what I think of as unnatural naturalness: using an artificial stillness to reveal something about natural movement.