Stillness in flux: the beyond "isms" series

Artist's Statement

It has been noted in my 1999 art-book, titled Beyond "Isms", that most interesting human developments occur somehow and almost always "from within the folds between cultures and epochs." In the ten years that has since passed, my view had broadened. In fact, it would not be wrong to say that, beyond cultures and epochs, new breakthroughs are often forged from within the meeting places between two or more distinctly differentiated objects, substances, attributes, qualities and even concepts. In practical application to painting, it is in this meeting place where the most pushing and pulling, advance and retreat, building and destroying, tearing and mending, peeling and covering... etc. in the interaction of opposing forces and fractions that discoveries have been made. It is under this dynamic framework of mind that I undertook my art-making.

In art, the dot and the line are the fundamental elements of making marks, from which more complex works such as paintings result. These interactions between dots and lines (and dashes) give rise to surface impressions such as skins, membranes, planes, layerings, wraps and other manifestations of surface tension that hold the spaces within and between them. The modern, globalised world (or what we call our reality) is, to me, an extremely complicated structure of such dynamic layerings and membranes. I believe each individual has to work out his own stillness and silence, amidst this constant state of flux that he is a part of. These paintings are my "working outs".

This exhibition is therefore entitled Stillness in Flux: the Beyond "-isms" series.