ROSS MORGAN


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STATEMENT



My paintings weave straight edges and organic forms together, shapes fold over and into each other blurring the distinction between foreground and background and evoking a strong sense of infinite space and depth. The compositional effects of colour are also utilised to this end, with pale natural, bodily colours being juxtaposed with high key, artificial synthetic colour, each simultaneously advancing and receding, creating associations within the viewer that are as familiar and seductive as they are fragmented and neurotic. Each canvas is in a constant state of flux, an infinity of possible readings, as if all could change or fall away at any given moment.


I begin my paintings with no preconceptions as to how they will look when finished. Each canvas is deliberately a different size or colour to the last, challenging me to approach it in an unrehearsed manner. This creates an intense improvisational dialogue between myself and the medium whereby the final appearance of the work is only decided through the process of making it. The forms and shapes in my paintings do not specifically represent anything outside of painting and I intend my works to be a kind of acknowledgement to the process of painting itself.






Although in some cases disguised by their erratic proximity to each other, the majority of marks present in my paintings are each executed in a single movement, one stroke of the brush across the canvas. The paint is mixed before it is applied and no blending of colours takes place on the surface of the work. The finished painting is a collection of these marks, each an individual record of my interaction with the brush, pigment and canvas, through which the chronology of their order of placement can be read. I decide a painting is complete when a sense of fragile structure has attached itself to the mass of brush marks forming a composition that presents the viewer with multiple starting points from which to begin navigating the work. The finished paintings lean towards abstract expressionism, resolving in dense and eclectic compositions where form and colour interact and jostle for space on the canvas.


Full statement available upon request.



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