Amalgamation
The paintings in my Amalgamation series are based on the concept of brushless painting, in which the paint is loaded into a dropper several colors at a time and then released onto the surface of the canvas. As the paint flows through the dropper, colors mix and form swirling convex drips that create a field of resonating color and complex spatial structures. My goal is to expose the paint’s natural ability to form shapes and patterns on its own after it is applied to the surface of the canvas.
The painting process creates texture on the surface of the canvas due to the convex shape of the paint drips and the overlapping of the drips that accrue. The colors create a type of push and pull between the foreground and background creating space—the texture creates real space, while the color interactions create the illusion of depth. For instance, warm colors generally tend to visually appear closer, while cooler colors visually appear further; in painting this in known as atmospheric perspective. But in these paintings, that fact depends on the texture: if warm colors are texturally in the background or cool colors are texturally in the foreground, then this illusion is reversed. Therefore, the interplay between the texture and the colors adds a quasi kaleidoscope effect.
