Statement on Drawing and Painting

Drawing is my thinking process and the drawings are my personal language, the 'triggers' for specific events, an image, smell, word or sentence at the edge of memory.

Simultaneously the physical activity of painting unlocks feelings through the visceral materiality of oil paint. I scrape into the painted surface to reveal what is underneath, I find images, lose them and rediscover them. Truncated figures, gardens, iconic plants, trees, architectural exits and entrances seen, remembered and imagined are described with passionate colour and gesture. It is the process of creating a history of making, a visual equivalent to the emotional world and the building of a layered structural richness.

My aim is to activate sensations, feelings and thoughts within the viewer, that they may discover their own special meaning in the paintings. In this way a work born out of my experience may speak to a wider audience about their own.

Geoff Morten

July 2008