Marches Makers Festival Artist 2021
Wayne Summers
The marks and tropes of mid-20th century art and design are hard-wired in my consciousness as exemplars of excellence; and the formative æsthetic of my childhood was determined by the numinous worlds conjured by British neo-Romantics. Arising from an examination of British prehistoric funerary monuments and apotropaic practices, my current paintings might be styled a form of anastylosis: fragments of mid-20th century painterly language are inflected with a 21st century sensibility in order to speculate on memory, the decipherment of the past and our (naturally) equivocal relationship with death. Their monochromatic palette is informed by the art historical precedent of using grisaille to communicate matters spiritual rather than quotidian.
If painting, like any other language, may be considered an abstract system of signs, there must be a pictorial vocabulary and syntactical rules which communicate meaning, however subjectively, and however equivocal its orthography. When individual expression and personal in(ter)vention subsume themselves under a principle of order, they derive new formal possibilities. My paintings are not necessarily, or at least not wholly, abstractions; but through figurative symbols and external references are amenable of multiple connotations, even when there may be a stated object.
In the absence of empirical or logical solutions, the work seeks to encourage personal meditation through visual engagement and to reassert the validity – and legitimacy – of mystery in an increasingly secular world predisposed to value only the demonstrable.
The marks and tropes of mid-20th century art and design are hard-wired in my consciousness as exemplars of excellence; and the formative æsthetic of my childhood was determined by the numinous worlds conjured by British neo-Romantics. Arising from an examination of British prehistoric funerary monuments and apotropaic practices, my current paintings might be styled a form of anastylosis: fragments of mid-20th century painterly language are inflected with a 21st century sensibility in order to speculate on memory, the decipherment of the past and our (naturally) equivocal relationship with death. Their monochromatic palette is informed by the art historical precedent of using grisaille to communicate matters spiritual rather than quotidian.
If painting, like any other language, may be considered an abstract system of signs, there must be a pictorial vocabulary and syntactical rules which communicate meaning, however subjectively, and however equivocal its orthography. When individual expression and personal in(ter)vention subsume themselves under a principle of order, they derive new formal possibilities. My paintings are not necessarily, or at least not wholly, abstractions; but through figurative symbols and external references are amenable of multiple connotations, even when there may be a stated object.
In the absence of empirical or logical solutions, the work seeks to encourage personal meditation through visual engagement and to reassert the validity – and legitimacy – of mystery in an increasingly secular world predisposed to value only the demonstrable.
