Inscape

For many years I have created artworks that tread a fine line between two-dimension painting and three-dimensional sculpture and explore notions of flatness, depth, perspective, and our physical perception of them. I have always had the eye of a sculptor but often appear more concerned with ideas that relate to painting and the picture plane and most notably here, the concept of the vanishing point, which is the basis for this project.

The concept of the vanishing point in painting is the area on the picture plane, traditionally on the horizon line and near the centre, where all lines of perspective converge and ostensibly disappear and is referred to as one point perspective. Architects and designers sometimes stretch reality making use of two-point perspective to increase our appreciation of a given space and it is even possible to expand to the three, four and five-point perspective but this leads us into the imaginary worlds of fisheye lenses or MC Escher, which have no relation to our everyday understanding of space.

It is the experience of our own personal sense of space that I am attempting to address with the Inscape project. These paintings are a dialogue between two sections split along a horizon with a top half that evokes the sky and a lower section that is either an interior or a huge receding stage. By employing the diamond form, I have in effect extended the horizon within the painting, exaggerating the sense of landscape in which we appear and fixing us in our fundamental human situation between earth and the sky.

Each artwork employs either one, two or multiple point perspective to give the viewer a sense that all is not quite as it should be in the real world. The tip of the point feels as if it is the obvious point of convergence, but the lines of the wood or parquet diverge left or right towards different vanishing points. The floor can both disappear into the distance and seemingly rear up in front of your eyes at the same time, as if are you standing looking into the corner of a room or in front of an immense landscape that opens in front of you inviting you on a contemplative journey into the painting.

At the core is an idea of continued progression, of time passing and a journey, our journey forever onwards toward the unknown as each work draws one into both physical and spiritual sense of being alone on a journey that itself is not as straight forward as everyday perspective would suggest.