Perhaps the most eye-catching element of my living room is the piece of artwork suspended from the ceiling. Why have art on the ceiling? Well, I would ask instead, why not? I absolutely adore the piece; the combination of the red, white and blue with the flashes of silver just makes it seem so alive.
The piece is an amalgam of styles, but like much of my work, it is all based on Pollock. I had the opportunity to go to the Peggy Guggenheim museum in Venice, and there I saw a fascinating mix of alchemy in Pollock’s work which really inspired this piece. Pollock has always been considered a “splasher of paint”, but there is so much more to discover there, especially when considering his own personal biography and the challenging life he led.
In this piece I emulated his style in the way that I used normal household paints like glosses, acrylics and solvents, such as Hammerite. The piece is the product of experimenting with and combining materials which are readily available from the local DIY centre, and reflects the crude and simple nature of art– you don’t need tubes and tubes of expensive paints from ‘artist shops’.
Art is simply painting anything that is conceivably possible, and doing what is impossible. Tying my piece together with one piece of rope, and suspending it from the ceiling certainly seemed to be testing the realms of possibility to me.
