Dark Journeys

To apply to these works a quote from the British critic David Sylvester writing about Paul Klee’s late compositions: "These are pictures without a focal point.  They cannot be seen by a static eye, for to look at the whole surface simultaneously, arranged about its center—or any other point which at first seems a possible focal point—is to encounter an attractive chaos.  The eye must not rest, it must allow itself to be forced away from the centre to find a point at which it can enter the composition—there are usually many such points, most of them near the edge—and so journey through the picture, 'taking a walk with a line'," [as Klee himself describes it].

 

With these works, the endless trails walked are intertwined everywhere throughout the compositions of the images, and deploy directions for the eye to wander, meandering paths through convoluted networks, sometimes inhabiting an unrecognizable space within strange fantastic landscapes.  The subconscious elements evoked during the uncalculated construction of the pictures, draw from within feelings aroused through personal associations with shapes suggestive of vaguely familiar often sinister forms inhabiting dreams of isolation and loss.  Pieter Brueghel’s landscape drawings of lonely mountain scenery, which stimulated his imagination during his travels through the Alps, provide much of the inspiration for part of the formal aspects of the pictures; the seemingly chaotic all-over designs found in paintings by many abstract expressionist artists supply some of the rest.