By Sean Kelly
David Hawley is a pattern painter. His work has always stressed the formal relationships within painting. In this sense his work could be squarely said to be in the late modernist context. Having stated that, it is necessary to point out that terms like the ‘modernist project’ may suggest that the concepts underlying it are necessarily finite. Hawley is one of many current painters who are proving the virtual inexhaustibility of formal painting. Any question of the limits of formal invention in painting are made redundant by the work of painters like Hawley who prove that there is still, and always will be unlimited scope for invention in pure painting.
Hawley’s commitment to, or even obsession, with pattern has been at the core of his work for over ten years but has become more rigorous as it has progressed. The rationale for placing pattern at the centre of his working method is based on a set of interesting strategies. Because Hawley’s practice is so rigorously formal, the pattern not only defines a limit and defined field of action it ironically deepens rather than restricts that exploration. By placing limits in the core motifs utilized it allows for enormous freedom of invention within those possibilities presented by that focusing of the compositional basis of the work. In this way the painter is forced to dive deeply into the still bottomless well of possibilities. Compositionally the core motif can also present virtually endless pattern or shape relationships so that it never becomes simply repetitive.
Explorations of colour and surface are also open in that they are unconnected to the requirements of figuration or connections with concepts other than the possibilities of pure painting. Hawley’s process then, while appearing to be reductive, is in fact the opposite. His colour relationships are the result of applying a self determined and specific set of colour relationship rules which are tested assiduously before being finally settled upon, tested in an almost scientific manner but guided by the primary determinant of instinctual judgment in the first and final instance. These choices and the relationships they develop are fascinating as they produce a colour relationship which is slightly off key. Based generally on the principal of complementary harmony, they wander slightly away from that exact relationship setting up harmonies that in jazz would be considered ‘blue notes’, like a chord attenuated by the slightly sharp or flat presence of a mildly discordant element. We know in music that this augmentation produces more colour or more emotional character to the sound. Its mildly unsettling quality therefore develops a tension in the colour balance which fascinates through its apparent correctness but which is in reality somewhat removed from the static and settled character of pure complementary harmony.
The end result of the series of formal limitations placed on the primary motif, the range and choice of colour and the set of textural manipulations at the surface, is a tight welding of these three elements into one indivisible unit. The picture plane becomes highly activated as the action all occurs within a shallow spatial range. Here again limit creates freedom though and the picture plane is disrupted through the application of often acidic colour highlights which leap forward but tie back into the field at other points. The resolution present in these works is the result of careful considerations and specific choices not arrived at through accident but trough experiment and trust in instinct as the final arbiter. In that sense they re-value the purely aesthetic and raise the purely formal once again to the high ground it previously occupied in aesthetic theory.
Hawley is one of a number of painters who have eschewed the mannerism, (and cynicism) of Post Modernism or the rampant figuration of the eighties and nineties. The whole field of painting is restored by a commitment to the concept that there are still diamonds to be found and polished in the deep mine of modernism, even though the surface workings may be thoroughly picked over.
Sean Kelly 2002