This growing series of works on paper are the result of the fluid interaction of natural and man made materials. They are executed outside, at dawn or dusk, sometimes in the rain or late at night, and they remain close to the ground or the water, revealing chance encounters with a myriad of visual stimuli: passing birds, small insects, wind blown leaves or shapes floating in passing streams. They are a fragile record of process and time, the uncertain result of a particular moment of elemental engagement, made without correction in one sitting. The location varies - sometimes close to home, sometimes in remote locations - and provides just a beginning, a way of collecting colour and light, and a way of observing the play of prevailing conditions on a paper surface which, once it is scattered with incidental markings and stained with coloured inks and organic matter, is then allowed to become saturated by the surrounding waters. As the series has progressed and grown in scale, it has become a record of days, an accumulation of provisional encounters. Each one begins again on a white surface, remaking what persists in memory with the material of a new day: a different light, a shift in temperature or wind direction, a vivid reflection or an enveloping mist. It is an approach that simultaneously extends and disturbs the familiar patterns built up during routine hours of studio practice, from which it is both an escape into an unpredictable world and a playful engagement with the flotsam and jetsam of the perceptual field. Luke Elwes 2012
‘In these works on paper the pattern of white, the areas of “thing” and “no-thing”, emerge through the delicate skeins of paint, the insistent linearity and the subtle layering of colour. Occasionally the particles are distributed across the picture plane like autumn leaves in an aerial ballet, or fragments of vegetation floating on a placid lake. The patterns gather and writhe into new configurations: the root system of a tree, the crow’s-foot spread of a river into a delta, the eddy and swirl of clearly-observed moving water carrying a cargo of flotsam. Occasionally it is as if we are looking through a faded and torn fabric onto some brightly-coloured spectacle beyond, revealed only in tantalizing glimpses. Elwes makes a kind of celestial confetti, a serene fusion of light and the motes dancing in it. He might also be painting a million million prayers, written on multi-coloured scraps of paper and scattered to the ends of the earth, falling alike on fallow ground or fertile. Whatever its cause, there is a quiet joy to his meditations, which chimes well with the understated beauty of his images’ Andrew Lambirth (extract from Catalogue essay for Adam Gallery London 2011)
