Andy Warhol
Sandra Blow
Tabitha Soren
Patrick Hughes
Day Bowman
Nelson Makamo
Takashi Murakami
Daisy Cook
Fred Ingrams
Barbara Rae
Bruce Mclean
Tracey Emin
REASON 1: The process of abstraction originally appealed to me as it seemed less restrictive than other styles of painting. However, I found that I needed to apply some of my own rules to make it work for me. One of the rules was to somehow ground the work in the idea of a place but to not have specifics and to let the work represent the world around us, but have no location or place. Achieving a balance between the imagined and the real is one reason why I love abstraction.
REASON 2: The second is that I would never like my work to be purely representational. I admire those that work towards representing our world in more literal terms, but for me it is just appreciation for a talent and the skill in communicating our surroundings.
REASON 3: I prefer to let the viewer interpret my paintings in their own way and using abstraction allows this to happen. It is great to hear what people see in it. I think it’s one of the major reasons why I paint the way I do.
REASON 4: I've never been a fan of inspiration and its place in reaching a finished painting. I believe that the finished painting will emerge from the process, rather than sitting around wait for the lightning bolt to strike. I think Chuck Close sums it up quite well: "The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If youʼre sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find thatʼs almost never the case". Working in abstraction allows me to create within a process. I am not entirely without inspiration, and travelling the coast lines of the U.K. and exploring some of its more remote places brings me to the fifth reason I love abstraction.
REASON 5: The opportunity to go out and explore these remote places and to take in as much as I can.
View PAUL'S full page on Rise Art HERE