Media Release November 2004

Christopher Guest Exhibits at The Light Gallery, London

Mountain View
2004, Oil on canvas
60 x 90 cm

 

These paintings, made over the last two years, have come from the Atlantic coast of Ireland, which has been drawing me to visit, again and again, since 1999. They show the landscape around Carna in Connemara, and Achill Island. Horses are a new theme, which also began for me in Ireland.

My work is driven by a sense of awe and wonder at a particular energy. It can be a place, or a person, an animal or a dream. The challenge is to find a way to replicate its unique power, to find a metaphor for it. And in the act of painting, the marks that emerge from the brush onto the page feel charged with a potency.

I compare that feel of the brush to Chinese calligraphy, where the apparently free brushstrokes only come after training in its precise use, in how touch is translated onto the page, in posture. It is intensely personal, and at the same time it is recognized as part of language and of a view of the world.

There are surges of energy that seem autonomous, and inexplicable. The painting begins to demand from me its own time: I interpret each mark to see if it needs another, until the painting calls a halt. The question then becomes whether the halt is for five minutes, a week, a year, or more.

There is nothing new in this: Bonnard, for example, says “wait for the emotion to come, it will rise.” What is always new is how, intuitively, we each filter our understanding of the world around us, as it is expressed or assessed in the marks on the canvas. It is a sensation, like the one a building can give you, as you walk past it or inside it. When it can even make the act of walking feel different. The public and the private intersect.

For me, the play, the space, between representation and abstraction in painting is an acknowledgement that there is a question about how much we can actually talk about that intersection. Both can seem like illusion, both like certainty. How much do we dare spell out in the face of what we know humanity is capable of, both good and bad?

Perhaps colour can always be hope: that may just be my own predilection. In any case, there is a freedom that we all have, in the many ways of looking. It is a freedom which goes together with a sometimes frightening gap. Like the frightening power of a landscape.