CANVAS SERiES
Meaning without narrative
The Canvas series extends the themes explored in my photographic work with an ongoing interest in surface, texture, gesture, and the traces left behind by time and action.
While my photographic series draw from the external world and finding beauty in urban fragments or subtle plays of light, these paintings are created in the studio, shaped by a more direct and physical engagement with material.
Yet they are connected. Both practices emerging from the same curiosity: how marks, layers, and surfaces can suggest mood, movement, and meaning without narrative.
A focus on gesture and texture
These paintings are realised through layered applications of acrylic or enamel paint, allowing gesture, texture, and accident to shape the image. Some works are bold and sweeping, others tangled and intricate. Each piece is improvised, unfolding through a process of adding, removing, and responding to what emerges.
The work is about texture, colour, and form, and allowing abstraction to invite attention.
As with the decaying surfaces in Obscura, or the shifting shadows in Luminara, these paintings encourage the viewer to slow down, to lean in, and to find meaning in the details.
A thread running through the series is the tension between control and chaos. Lines loop and knot, paint is dragged, poured, or scratched. Surfaces are worked over, obscured, or allowed to remain raw.
There are echoes here of weathered walls, worn pavements, and the accidental compositions of the street, those which remain after time, movement, and chance have done their work.
Tension between control and chaos
The palette of the Canvas series often leans toward primary colours; reds, yellows, blues layered with black, white, or muted tones. This deliberate simplicity keeps the focus on gesture and texture, inviting the viewer to engage without distraction.
Physicality is at the core of this series. The paintings are made quickly, instinctively, often in one or two sessions.
Painting has become an extension of the same observations that drive my photographic work.
It’s another way of exploring how meaning can emerge without words or narrative, how abstraction can hold something felt, something emotional, something human.
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Ultimately, the Canvas series is about process, attention, and presence. It is about finding beauty in imperfection, and allowing material, gesture, and chance to tell their own quiet story.
