Making work in the studio this week for a Group Exhibition titled ‘Nothingness’. The exhibition will feature work from four other artists: Hideki Arichi, Jo Howe, Alex McIntyre and Will White who all work in different media.

It’s a subject i wanted to approach from a personal perspective, tackling my own relationship to feelings of nothingness. How i would  communicate/depict this existential idea has been a really interesting and intriguing journey so far.

I suppose there are plenty of painters who have tackled this subject in the past and i must particularly acknowledge reference to Rothko’s later works, all dark and inky and bruised. I have always loved them and been moved by them.

There is also a painting by Matisse called ‘The Open Window’ painted in 1914, which i have always found fascinating. It depicts a view into or out of a window, into a dark room or out into the dark at night. His understanding of colour and it’s capacity to entice emotion is striking, and the ambiguity of the image is both intriguing and unsettling. I wanted to do something similar: to convey a sense of  unreality as well as isolation and detachment and to communicate a sense of how it felt to be in a state of ‘nothingness’.

The colours of dusk/eve have a large part to play in the paintings i’ve made to date. Using a mixture of cobalt and prussian blue,  a dark but glowing colour, one that is seductive and sinister at the sametime. I still haven’t quite got the colour right, so i’m back in the studio later today to rework the surface with tinted glazes. How i create a luminosity and darkness at the same time, i’m not sure.