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Dark blue almost black

Outside my studio is a free-standing basketball hoop. During moments of procrastination it provides a necessary distraction. It is where I can think things through; it is a momentary escape from the challenges of the works in progress inside the studio.

Images become etched into one’s mind over periods of sustained looking and their distinctive qualities may be overly familiarized. They are easily lost or overworked. A few dozen free-throws divert my attention and avert my gaze and I am usually able to re-enter the studio refreshed. However, there are also periods where I am unable to disconnect from my minds eye and consequently my shooting percentage is poor. It is during these fixated states of mind that qualities of the work manifest themselves in the most unlikely of things. Cracks in pavement, brightly coloured signage, and even television advertisements suddenly bear resemblance to the work where none was intended. It is possible to develop an affinity with the most obscure of phenomena.

When connected in this way developments in the studio seem profoundly relevant to all areas of human endeavor. The art matters a great deal. These are moments of fleeting grandiosity, immersed in the zone of production.

The ten images in this series have made it through periods of intense scrutiny. I could place no deadline for their completion, instead a point in time was reached at which I simply had to stop (exactly when they began I cannot say). A strict work routine was adhered to. Strategies were both pre-determined and altered along the way. Engaged in the making I was able to refine my sensibilities. Only upon completion could I properly gauge the implications of what had gone on before.

A mix of technological and human interventions incorporated into the process of making the work give it currency, as the specific formal qualities required could not be achieved during earlier historical periods. They are made in and of the now because the machines responsible for their being have only recently become available. However the works do not adhere to typical conventions of art associated with new technology. There are no digital screens or computers evident in the final product. Instead they take on the look of possibly the oldest art specific technology; painting.

This is not to pre-suppose that contemporary painting actually has a generic look. Rather the works pose as painting while the means of their production are actually photo-copying, restricted digital manipulation and screen-printing. They are in fact posers on a number of levels, but not impostors because dialogues concerning the exclusivity of painting have long since expired. What is and what isn’t painting has been expanded indefinitely.

The rendering of forms in the work imitate the hand of the artist. Meandering lines and quirky shapes appeared only after the click of a mouse, not the flick of a brush; they are the product of computer software. A distinction between organic and inorganic components is no longer pertinent as the relationship is one of symbiosis. Nature is culture and vice versa.

The title Dark blue almost black suggests a state of uncertainty, and subsequently there is a risk the works may be perceived as neither here nor there. But this state has its own place or space, it is unconventional and difficult to categorize. What it is and is not is a source of on-going enquiry. This condition is also part of the subject of the work and feeds upon a natural desire in the viewer for recognition. Concurrently a lack of clear categorization does not restrict the potential for meaning, it is just not pre-determined. In Dark blue almost black a mechanism for meaning is present through phenomenological enquiry as contemporary formalism.

Motifs (figure and ground) sit on the surface or are encased underneath transparent layers of screen-printed vinyl ink. A sensation of depth is achieved via submersion. This quality sits alongside apparitions more commonly associated with perspective, the former existing in the literalness of the materials and the latter adhering to more conventional pictorial elements. Two ideologically conflicting states in the history of recent abstract painting; literalness and illusion, are present alongside each other, neither assuming priority. The boundaries are blurred.

It is individual life experiences and infinite interactions with diverse influences (art specific or not), that foster motivation and determine the conceptual and technical framework to construct artwork. This source material is accessible to anyone intrigued to seek it out. The works in Dark blue almost black are an expansion of ongoing themes. They are idiosyncratic and personal, but also engage with a collective consciousness accessible on a global scale. To describe the series as a progression is an over-simplification, for culture cannot always be viewed in linear pathways. What is evident, however, is a striving to continue and ascertain a degree of currency for a discipline in a perpetual post-apocalyptic state.

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On there backs were vermiculite patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery. 1

David Hawley
April 2010

1. Cormac McCarthy, The Road, 2006, Random House, Inc., New York, p.241