'Art is a form of daily meditation on the three cornerstones of human experience: life, death and love. The many permutations of these three shape our daily events and human behaviour- our collective history, memory and hope

Most of my works bear some reference to war, mortality and fragility of culture. The extreme experiences of war and genocide, as collective madness, evoke an element of chaos and transform our collective consciousness, bringing out both its creative and destructive elements. I think of my paintings as investigations into the unreliable nature of safety, possessions and knowledge - and the search for spirituality of some sort, as a promise of compassion. '

'I would like my paintings to be a sort of a koan, that can be seen from many angles... and, ideally, every viewer would see something personally valid in it, or have an interpretation of his/her own. '

I guess the only (very general) criticism is on the lack of compassion in our greed, and the incredible amount of waste in our culture - waste of resources, of effort, talent, life (human and animal), thought, focus. And when you talk about 'lambs' - they may have started as an image from a slaughterhouse, but, for me, they contain reference to many things: from genocide, to ritual sacrifice to religion (and that would be a loooong discussion in itself!), from loss of innocent trust to political stupidity of people ('the flock') and, even more personally, from 'killing the Ego', to my own thoughts and actions, which lead to suffering -- and didn't have to.'

'My landscapes are somewhere between memory and reality. Yes, there is a sense of loneliness and abandonment in them, and in that sense they always reflect a place I see when I close my eyes... This place affects me in different ways, depending on my life circumstances - sometimes it's a suffocating silence that has a scream underneath, and sometimes it's a place of refuge, clarity, and stillness. I like thinking of them as 'eternal', and the viewer (including myself) is more of a visitor, passing through.'

'I call them (portraits) 'faces', because they are portraits of moods, not of lives and characters... Mood not as a momentary expression (with a particular reason), more as a general tone of someone's existence. I'd like to take a certain category of life experiences and give it a face. So, White Girl can be seen as a particular person - but I 'd prefer thinking of her as an image of a state of being ."

.'I look into the darker side of humanity because I cannot pretend that I don't see it- and the only way to cope with it is to understand it better. I think my paintings express some of that unreliable nature of our sense of security, possessions and knowledge, our unlimited potential for violence- as well as compassion- and the everlasting search for spirituality of some sort."

Realism is a process, and a viewpoint. It is about understanding one’s environment: physics of things, weight, speed, gravity, temperature, potential to move or change.  This happens on both rational and intuitive levels.

'Sometimes I tend to notice voids rather than objects... things that are missing, irregular, incomplete and illogical…'

'My main concerns are emptiness and light.  The first contains the potential energy for existence (life), the second transforms the first into space (place).'

'I find that having a ‘subject’ in art often leads to repetitive ‘production’ and is in many ways a denial of art as constant search and experimentation. This doesn’t mean that one should not explore a particular problem in depth, even if it takes years, but what I mean by ‘repetitive’ and ‘production’ is remaining at the same level in terms of both ideas and techniques without any sense of exploration or risk. This is the dead end, when art becomes a ‘personal style’.'

'The only themes that repeat in my painting are life, death and affection.'

'When painting, I’m often guided by the sound of the image on canvas. It is said for a voice that it has a particular colour- I find that paintings have a distinct sound or harmony as well, and I’m often guided by it. I look for the clarity of voice, or perfection of silence. The sound I’m looking for can be best described as a distant thunder or a rumble of a particular deep and dark tone… or a complete, deaf silence.'

'Kitsch is a mannered, saccharine 'art' that doesn’t have any other goal but to cause a simple and safe, superficial and singular emotional response - usually of safety, pathos or excitement. Maybe that is why people are afraid to research emotions through art, and approach their work with a deadly sincerity, taking the risk of being seen as ‘emotional’ or ‘kitsch’… so they wrap their practice in words and history and sociology to justify the image and give it some weight, while forgetting that there are only three things that matter after all: the artist, artwork, and viewer.

It may take some courage to throw away that blanket of art talk and reference that keeps us safe.'

ESSAYS

by A S HAMILTON

by BRUCE W WHITEHEAD

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