How our paintings work and what they mean

For
Our paintings are about muted colour contrasted with vibrant colour -- dark versus light at some points, elsewhere a tonal similarity. Plus it’s all done with a painterly application, so there is a constant play within the geometric divisions of broken, slightly scrubby surfaces contrasted with flatter ones.

Complication
The tonal juxtapositions mean that there is a rather 3D illusionist aspect to the paintings, but this effect is a by product of other experiments, it’s not a starting point.
Curiously enough the interest in experimenting with tonal contrast comes from looking at figurative painting and has a relationship to the body, because of the way the eye recognises form from tone. Why are we interested in changes in tone? Because they tell us something about what’s ‘there’. In real life we understand what we see by registering changes in tone.

 




three-dimensional by-product




form through tone

Further complication
We start with local colour relationships (what one triangle does to the next one) and adjust these in relation to the way the whole thing looks. Local relationships can throw up impossible contrasts, the painting can seem to tip sideways, or shout too loudly in some areas. We adjust and adjust (whilst trying to retain the original decisions as much as possible.) We don't care about triangles as such, of course. We don't even really care about abstraction. We're looking for metaphors for effects of light. 
  



What it looks like half done

Question
Why triangles? Well it’s easier to say why not other things. (Of course triangles are just an economic way of dividing up a space. In the way we’re using them they intrinsically express the whole form, the overall rectangle.) We use bounded colour because melded, fused, brushy or splashy colour and form has a particular meaning: at the moment it connects to meaning in 1950s painting, and all the baggage that painting and colour from that time has. Painting that seems to be of that moment, the Abstract Expressionist moment, let’s say, is impossible now because it’s too politically loaded. We don’t want anyone to think we’re addressing those issues – we’re not about masculine freedom, for example.
  




not the old cult of this

Curious sincerity
It may sound as if we’re against being arch because we’re pro being sincere, but actually sincerity isn’t our point at all. We do earnest experimentation. This leads us into traps that we have to get out of: for example, the work seeming to be about things that it isn’t about – it isn’t about freedom, even though people might look at it and in a lazy way assume it’s about free expression. However, there is something in this sincerity issue – and this is a very sensitive area for us, because we don’t want to be misunderstood. But we suspect that in the work there is an expression of idealism. We think that there is something ‘right’ about colour, and it may be that we are on a quest to find ‘the right’.
  





absolutely right