Annie Brown

I don’t want to create timid or feeble paintings. Every mark must be bold and confident.

“‘Attack the canvas’… I mean that Matisse in the gentlest way began to disrupt the unity of the canvas. All the great painters have felt that you have to re-establish unity, you don’t have to preserve it.” – Gouk, A (1988) Hans Hofmann: Late Paintings. The Tate Gallery.

A negotiation of painting to challenge the qualities of the canvas surface; the rectilinearity, the flatness, the object is a more challenging proposal than having a subject matter to represent. Each painting I do is treated as ‘a whole’, using its rectilinearity to gauge the first primary moves.

Motifs such as squares within squares bring out the objecthood of the painting. This formality of a square is then questioned with a gesture passing through. Strategies like this have been long practised by artists through the years with painters such as Josef Albers with his ‘homage to the square’ and other more lyrical abstract painters such as Hans Hofmann.

Through long reflections, it has been important for me to realise that I am most in awe of the sun going up or down. There is a tangible sensation from the warm reflections and lines found in architecture. Interior spaces are affected as the relation between the inside outside is interfered with. It is this extreme quality of colour that I want to echo and the feeling it creates for a beholder. The colours hold an internal light and have relationships to luminosity. I knew I needed to live somewhere with a different hotter climate for a period to see how my colour choices would change. Living in Lisbon showed me how my experience of the immediate environment affects me. Matisse’s travelling also was because of his need to be in hot countries for his colour as it needed the vibrancy that the light of the sun gave.

Large DIY brushes, brooms, scrubbing brushes; I use these to paint each decision individually allowing the facture of each mark to be intuitive and experimental in nature. Playing with transparency by adding in mediums, layering over less pigmented mixtures to change the surface introduces a sense of lightness for the colours to come through. Acrylic paint is not always mixed to full opacity, I permit the brushstroke to hold the energy of the action through flecks of colours appearing through the mark.

A large proportion of the painting process is taken up by long meditative thinking, I sit for periods of time looking at the painting, waiting for answers to emerge. A reflective state allowing me to be semi present allows an agency in the painting to deliver suggestions. It is during these periods of time where I offer colour blocks pre-prepared as options to see how the painting acts with the additional possibilities.

The colours must independently say something. In the general conversation happening, they speak and resonate off of each other, each assuming different qualities and rhythms. The best functionality and behavioural role for each colour must be worked out. Simultaneously, each decision made within the whole of the surface must act in balance with the whole. This means each area of the painting is treated as an event or drama and theatricality must exist within each part. The parts push and pull out of an illusionary pictorial space with a background, midground and foreground. Therefore, although I am not a representational painter, I have to take reference from a memory of space that I have experienced.

The paintings as objects are large and confrontational. They match the scale of the body, present when painting and beholding. They are unstretched and hang materially, I do not wish to cut off the edges as these are as equally important as the middle. You feel as you see the paintings that the brushstrokes could carry on past the object of the surface to an illusionary space: this is the space I want the beholder to feel as believable as an imagined and memorable sensation.