Paint is wonderful stuff.
It covers and colours and reveals. It piles up in ridges and smooths itself on surfaces. It folds like liquid and makes itself obvious. It blends, combines and it disappears.
Paint seldom sets out to deceive; what you see is what you get. But it does allow itself to be transformed. And what paint is able to achieve is quite beyond words.
Here is a compelling painting by Alison Tyldesley which revels in paint.
Stony Beach and Turquoise Sea, 76cmx76cm, oil on deep canvas
I love the colour in this work; I love the impact it makes on my mind.
This is the kind of image which catches attention.
This is a dynamic painting. Paint is piled on to the canvas in layers: the blues, and greens, and yellows, and pinks, moulded,shaped and spread in exciting ways. It's a painting which makes you want to look.
But it also extends an invitation. We are offered no less than an opportunity to co-create. With very little effort, we can 'see' shorelines and skylines in this painting. Alison has provided us with cues to construct a whole landscape. Yet this is far more than a picture of a place, presented in a hazy kind of way; that is not (it seems to me) what the painting is about. That mental landscape we made has a purpose. It provides us with a context, a stage on which something else takes place.
I expect that many people's attention is drawn quickly to the patch of bright pink roughly mid-canvas. It quickly becomes a focal point. Everything else seems to be there to make that brightness possible.
When I talked with Alison she mentioned the part which memory plays in her work. Memory is a fertile and creative space. Without realising we are doing it, we re/construct our memories so that they hold and frame what is most important for us. It seems to me that Alison has done that here. Her painting invites us to do the same: to create a framework within which something else is discovered.
And what might that patch of brightness signify for us?
Return to the image.
A burst of light? A distant promise or hope?
And how does our inner being respond to it?
Someone I know said that she feels she could walk into Alison's paintings.
Wittingly or not, I think that's what Alison invites us to do.
See more of her work here: http://alison-tyldesley.co.uk/
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