In-grown

Inspired by "Reckoner" – Radiohead

This painting is the effect of my intention to create a personal visual response to a song that continually provides me with the sense that something needs to grow from it. As such, the process and product became a visual journey of the song, a journey through the world of "Reckoner" as I feel and see it. The sense of growth seemed to become the most prominent imagery in the process drawings and ultimately the painting. This was reflected in the tendency of one mark to sprout another and eventually form a chaotic system of thinking and feeling. The colours speak of the melancholic undertone contrasting with a picture of sharpness, brightness and assertiveness, which the piece of music communicates to me. There is a feeling of moving forward and a highlight in the melancholy.

The result is an odd landscape with a certain system of chaos, dealing with the contrast and harmony of binaries such as above vs below, outside vs inside, growth vs deterioration, organic vs geometric, revealing vs concealing and spontaneity vs constraint. It reveals the chaos underneath the surface: moving, thinking, feeling, working, growing, wanting to break out and move into another dimension. The work stands as a visual account of a process, a journey, the working up and layering of information and the playing with and structuring of that information.

The aim with this painting was to contemporise a painting by J.M.W Turner by creating my own version of it in which I reference something that concerns me about life today. I decided on a painting by J.M.W Turner because of the sublimity of his work and his focus on the overwhelming immensity and power of nature. I feel that my process of playing off his work to create something of my own becomes a method by which I place a contemporary spin on it. However, my chief concern was to create a sort of duality and tension between two very different forms of time and space. The one is the time and space one experiences when submerged in nature where time seems to disappear and the stresses of everyday life seem to fall away. It is organic and tumultuous yet it retains a beautiful, serene, calming quality. The other is the time and space of everyday life with all its angst, worries and shortsightedness, where it always seems as if there is not enough time to get everything done. Visually, to me, this routine focused space is geometric with hard straight lines and flat surfaces (the contemporary edge). This painting is an attempt to bring these two spaces together resulting in the formation of an ambiguous visual conflict where these spaces struggle to coexist.