Reality Vs Escape

How immersive should your art be?

There’s really no right or wrong answer to this, but I think of it as a knob we tweak as the social need demands. It’s really time to get people out of escape mode and back into reality. Everyone craves it.

To that end, I think it makes sense to make art that responds to that need, and over the last year I’ve increasingly started adjusting my own method to suit that. In other words, making works that you don’t have to look at too long and too closely to make sense of. It’s walking back towards being merely wallpaper but not too far to that extreme. I’m not committed to staying solely on this track, but I just wanted a few paintings added to my portfolio that just don’t ask people to think too hard and have enough scale to give the room some character.

Let’s put it this way:

You paint ONE painting, dense with detail and happenings. No one can possibly interpret it in a quick glance. They have to spend some time looking closely at it and ignoring anything else around them.

Now compare it with this:

You paint a series of paintings, but they aren’t necessarilly very deep. Maybe a quick glance will do. But they can fill the walls of the room.

Now ask yourself:

What effect will these different methods have on the people in the room?

Which one will get them looking primarily at a painting on the wall? Which one will get them looking more at each other, with an occasional side-glance?

Can your paintings determine how social or detached people will be?

When you look at the opinions over the works of the past, you find varying eras where people crave simplicity and where they crave complexity. One is usually compensating for the other.

And that’ll be that…

Two paintings I did in quick succession that are essentially vertical landscapes other worlds… or maybe our world in another time…

The point is they didn’t take long, didn’t use many colours and are pretty-much straight to the point. Stick them on your wall, like them, and get on with your day.