Category: Op Art
-
Beholden Eye
Beauty is an individual concept formed in part by social agreement, – you buy into what the media present, and what is current fashion. Maybe you will be baffled by my enjoyment of this piece of rusting beach architecture and agree with my partner who says in slight bafflement, ‘beauty is in the eye of…
-
Watercolour
I walk with a camera and collect images along coasts wherever I am. Occasionally they are of the quality of holiday snapshots which are collected after each trip and made into a memory book for continuing pleasure, sometimes they make stories, but often they are collected for their own sake. I look for the things…
-
Grid Locked
J.S. Mill said in effect freedom is the ability to challenge the rules, the grid of laws and social convention. As artists we should challenge, change, innovate not conform to other expectations. The grid of galleries, art market and critics are not the arbiters of quality but a reflection of a reality unrelated to art,…
-
300 Days
My Verdun Triptych has now found a new home in a local public school, and there’s a story behind this dating back to the 1970’s. When I complete my degree course I was upset to be handed the application forms for a posts-graduate teaching course. This seemed like a vote of no-confidence by the college…
-
Basket Case
Scale is an important consideration in relation to the mark. I want to be able to put myself into the work and that means working with the whole body. As pieces get smaller so the ‘hinge’ around which the mark rotates changes. Small pieces use the wrist as the hinge, then it progresses to the…
-
Mining the Past
“did the grid” of squares I have used for years, represent “the same mental repression I was criticising in the other artists’ work” she asked? This brought me up short. I have used the grid for many years, for many of which I was locked into a marriage that was loveless. I justified the grid…
-
Square Peg?
All my paintings start from my enjoyment of my visual world, and the image stories I create and show on my Facebook page are as important an expression of this for me as the more formalised realisation of ideas in the studio. As to where I go from here only time and work will tell.…
-
The Nature of Art
I continue to find beauty on my walks, the latest interest sparked by the colours of spring blossoms falling into the gutters around my small town of #Seaford. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but if artist are to regain their position in history as the visual priest/magicians of our world, then…
-
The Bauhaus and Me #3
Albers used paints straight from the tube showing how colour against colour changed perception of each in juxtaposition. Seeing change in a stable situation suggested that change in life could be seen too when it seemed unchanging. As one critic remarks, when these painting appeared in the 1950’s it marked the end of the Bauhaus…
-
The Everyday
artists use what they see or find around them as a starting point. Whether it is a wheat field by Van Gogh, a grass field by Wyeth, a picnic table by Caulfield or an unmade bed by Emin, artists take from what they see or experience and transform it into a reflection of their own…
-
Process
In previous pieces, such as the one on the Brexit Daisy, I have described the grid as a part of accidental politics. As I have been spending longer and longer submerged in the studio, surrounded by paint and pastels, smelling the aroma of both, scrabbling, scratching, brushing, scrubbing away at the layers I apply I…
-
Walking Backwards
This week or so past I have been working on primed paper to produce a series of squares as a precursor to the painting that is now on the easel. There is a great deal more drawing to come as I work on breaking down the square, but drawings need to be interspersed with canvas…
patrickgoff.com 