“Beginnings” explores the beauty and calamity of change. Each element of the painting captures this duality. The blue background is a rough and motive sea - disturbed into darker blues by the creatures that move through it. Yet that same blue is the calm colour of space and freedom. Abstracted figures dominate the scene: flying dragons, eagles preying on snakes, but also quieter creatures - mollusks and amoeba - hints at the potential of evolution. Both the eagle and the dragon are nascent . Who knows what they could become?
At first glance, the colours are joyfully vibrant, but they also tell of struggle. In the warm colours, there is the burning of birth, claret blood diffusing through water. These liquids - rich with salt and pain are the beginnings and the substances of life. There are also the pinker colours of sunrise, the juices of ripe fruit, the green of lush, underwater grasses.
The texture of the work reveals the process of its creation. There are visible layers of acrylic, imperfectly smoothed, brush strokes around smaller details and thick, poured paint that has dried into islands of tangible texture.
Change is abstraction. Transformation resists being captured in a clearly interpretable image. But if we do hold it still for a moment, in all its weirdness, we see all the wonders and terrors it has to offer.