Acrylic paint, photograph linen and resin on board
Size: 23cms x 90cms
On
my work and practice. Terry Shave 2002
My practice is and always has been, unashamedly eclectic; an emotive rationalising of anomalous and often incongruous ideas, images and working methods. This relationship between content/idea and process/manufacture has always fascinated me. The dilemma of 'high' fine art versus the decorative or designed, the tussle between an interest in a tradition of gestural painting with a cerebral and logical minimalist ideology. My concerns are not in the resolution of these dilemmas, more the way I can elucidate the schism through painting. The use of the triptych, a format I have used over fifteen years, allows for obvious thematic juxtapositions as well as referencing historical sources. It also allows for the suggestion of visual narratives and my continued interest in the relationship of film to the static image. Recent work continues my fascination with the process of painting, partly through the physical act of the manipulation of paint and also as seen through photography. The photographs used often appear like paintings, and have a number of the attributes of painting, at the same time they don't function in the way we are used to reading photographs. These dilemmas and contradictions in picturing intrigue me. Ultimately I am making pictures of and about other pictures. I am not interested in making a photograph/painting that describes the world we live in but I am interested in how the conventions of picturing allow us to 'read' an image and decode its meaning in terms of our relationship to a notion of the categoric or the 'real'. I want the work to function on two levels, to elicit the sense of familiarity of looking at an image that has the structures and conventions and a history of painting embedded in it, to make you aware of that, and at the same time to shift your attention to the very act of looking and thinking about the act of painting itself.
My practice is and always has been, unashamedly eclectic; an emotive rationalising of anomalous and often incongruous ideas, images and working methods. This relationship between content/idea and process/manufacture has always fascinated me. The dilemma of 'high' fine art versus the decorative or designed, the tussle between an interest in a tradition of gestural painting with a cerebral and logical minimalist ideology. My concerns are not in the resolution of these dilemmas, more the way I can elucidate the schism through painting. The use of the triptych, a format I have used over fifteen years, allows for obvious thematic juxtapositions as well as referencing historical sources. It also allows for the suggestion of visual narratives and my continued interest in the relationship of film to the static image. Recent work continues my fascination with the process of painting, partly through the physical act of the manipulation of paint and also as seen through photography. The photographs used often appear like paintings, and have a number of the attributes of painting, at the same time they don't function in the way we are used to reading photographs. These dilemmas and contradictions in picturing intrigue me. Ultimately I am making pictures of and about other pictures. I am not interested in making a photograph/painting that describes the world we live in but I am interested in how the conventions of picturing allow us to 'read' an image and decode its meaning in terms of our relationship to a notion of the categoric or the 'real'. I want the work to function on two levels, to elicit the sense of familiarity of looking at an image that has the structures and conventions and a history of painting embedded in it, to make you aware of that, and at the same time to shift your attention to the very act of looking and thinking about the act of painting itself.
