I am very honored to have been selected as a finalist for this years Dobell Drawing Prize.
My entry is a large Posca on board drawing (2.4 metre pine plank), I wanted to make something that stands over you, tall and thin like a tear in the surface if reality. I am very excited to see it exhibited among the work of so many other excellent artists.
The exhibition will be installing this week and opening later in the month.
This painting, the first of 2021, follows on from work I started making in 2018.
The glowing line on a field of noise has become more complex thanks to the geometric experiments and insights of drawings made last year. Here I am using the same tessellating forms as my recent watercolour work, in which a composition is discovered by projecting lines from the corners of a grid, moving up one side and then reflected down the other. In the execution of this painting I have again attempted to retain something of the scratchiness of a drawn surface and allowed for many minor imperfections and bleeds to occur.
A balancing of elements in this signal-to-noise ratio.
©ADG2021
Recentley I have been experimenting further with watercolour. I started with some small ones (A5) before moving to a larger format (A3), intuitively choosing colour and shade, working quickly allowing for areas of bleeding and incidental colour mixing.
I am making these thinking that they could potentially be translated into acrylic on canvas and to better understand the geometries of this system. I am attempting to create some patterned surfaces that will operate as autostereograms (better known as Magic Eye pictures) that produce the illusion of a three-dimensional scene. I have also made some digital examples of this technique and the effect works as described...
By focusing through the surface of the image an illusion of receding space can be seen, and by narrowing sections of the pattern a gradation of depth can be achieved. This composition almost achieves the desired effect.
©ADG2021
This new one is on hand cut ply-wood with a backing frame I constructed. The colours used are a sequence of Red / Green / Blue and a black with two greys. Here I was trying to capture something of a grease smudge on a smartphone screen, a fascinating analogue glitch that makes the typically invisible (glass) visible in a dazzling spectrum of refracted light. Because of the hand-made board I primed around the outside edge to seal it and so I decided to carry the line work off the edge also.
©ADG2020
These new compositions generated a desire to make another wallpaper image for iPhone. The great thing about this geometry is it is totally adaptable to any square format. Feel free to use this on your phone, but be sure to alter it to the right specifications for you screen (scale it within the frame [set to still]) and enjoy this digital cavern as a moody site for all your floating app icons.
©ADG2020
Graphite and watercolour on canvas [50 x 40cm]
This panting is a study made using the same geometries as the recent Posca work but here is filled using a system of three blended colours alternating in left to right, top to bottom rotation within each shape. I have been making more and more drawings with this system to better understand the various interactions.
Here, perhaps because of the use of expired watercolours, the result has strange echoes of early 20th century abstraction like those made by artists like Paul Klee or Sonia Delaunay (this was unintentional).
I am continuing experimentation with these forms, persisting with intuitive colour relations and with the purchase of a new watercolour set I expect this work to evolve further.
©ADG2020
This is one of a new series of drawings, and a return of the use of Posca paint-markers in my work. Following on from the geometries of recent work (based off the twelve point division of a regular format), I compose a pattern across one third of the board and then repeat and extend tessellated segments edge to edge. This is both a way of discovering unique shaped figures within a regular format and filling that regular format (rectangle) completely.
After so much shaped work I often return to standard formats to develop an approach for supporting work on canvas and to exercise a thorough understanding of the patterns generated.
The unexpected appearance of these patterns is enticing as I see their parallel to digital glitches on computer screens or a bad signal on a cathode-ray tube (CRT) television, producing analogue distortions like a vertical hold rolling screen.
©ADG2020
