Adventures in Living Colour...

Just because something is just a canvas covered with paint, doesn't mean to say it cant be an experience in itself. Otherwise how would Bridget Riley and the Op Art movement succeed? And why shouldn't that type of painting continue to succeed? One only has to look at the craze for Magic Eye pictures just a few years back to see what a popular and powerful phenomena can be created just from a flat print, and painting can offer MUCH more than that! Architects and planners continue to utilise Bauhaus type notions of space and colour in their designs to help human beings commune with their places of work and living. So why has Fine Art abandoned these simple ideas that still have a lot more life left in them. There is so much possibility in the world of colour, just pigments suspended in a carrier applied to a surface.
Here are some explorations I have had using colours mixed from bog-standard acrylic tubes...



These are Monkeys that I did before my Foundation course. I was really interested in complementary colours and the optical disturbances they cause. I was trying to re-create the moment when I was reading my Tom and Jerry cartoon annual when I was a kid and the light blue and red shimmered and seemed to move and jump right out of the page!
I hope to recreate this effect in a grand scale, room-sized scale, maybe for my final project in the 3rd Year. In the meantime, I wanted to put down as many colours at a time as I could, with bland but striking repetitive patterns that would accentuate the placement of hues and tones..






Just imagine a whole room filled with this butterfly pattern! How overwhelming would it be? How long could people stand to stay in a space like that?