Cysylltiad Lliw + Colour Connections
John Hedley and Andrew Smith
“Cysylltiad Lliw + Colour Connections” brings two artists who are engaged with colour together for the first time. This exhibition is the culmination of a continual dialogue over several years and has led to a recent focused production time of new work and collaboration resulting from each artists' different perspectives on colour.
In terms of previous practice, both artists have searched for greater clarity in objective and subjective contexts, and both artists have developed parallel portfolios at different locations in Wales, Europe and global locations. In order to collaborate, develop understanding of and critically respond to each other’s creative methods, Hedley and Smith have made a series of paintings in their respective studios whilst maintaining a close critical dialogue that in turn has fed back to this joint exhibition. The exhibition features first time collaboration using Japanese papers made on location in Crete. Collaboration on actual work sets a precedent for both artists with implication and significance in the widest context.
John Hedley
The works in this exhibition represent the culmination of many years’ development and research, evolving from interpretations of nature combined with studies in iconography and the Byzantine influence in contemporary Greek art. They are a visual representation of art’s relationship to nature, symbolism, and our place in both the natural world and our constructed world.
Each work is an organic, three-dimensional or two-dimensional abstraction composed of oil paint with gold, silver and copperleaf layered on organically shaped pieces of native, naturally fallen wood, sourced in Ynys Mon and Crete. Unique and with its own expression, each piece impresses its own story. The process is a symbiosis between artist, colour and medium which helps to evoke the environment the tree comes from.
Responding to the shape, patterns, and grain of the timber, the work transcends conventional uses of wood found in traditions such as icon painting. Both in contrast to, and comparable with the veneration of Byzantine icons, we are reminded to humble ourselves in awe and wonder of that which stands before us, in this instance, the natural world that created us and inspired art.
The series John is presently working on is due to Storm Arwen which resulted in a lot of windfalls at Bodnant Gardens. He has been given some of the wood from the fallen trees and the idea is to talk about their environment and the story of the tree. This is work in progress. John would like to thank the staff at Bodnant and the National Trust for their support.
Fundamentally, these images are composed through colour and the emotion it releases. The paintings tell a story of the tree through the language of colour. In this, it is the tree itself which provides organic imagery. This allows the emergence of symbolism and landscape through the organic abstraction.
Andrew Smith
Andrew has recently returned from a residency in Morocco, where the immersive experience identified facets of culture and natural light that permeates this current work. International placements have been a key feature of Andrew’s recent practice. He defines working on location and subsequent reflective work, as creating ‘scapes’ (involving multiple facets of a subject) evolved through both exploratory studies and in the production of a definitive project portfolio for exhibition.
Taking as a point of reference the idea of non-place, his painting has evolved through a parallel questioning of objectivity, exploring memory and experience. He uses diffused imagery to interrogate reality, a dense clustering of line, shape and colour, intersections, gestures and directions. Through a desire for a more flexible and less structured image, his painting has developed to a more expressive idiom with gesture and the dynamic application of paint to the fore.
Painting is a recording of the mind in motion, the movement of hand, instinctive; a suspension of consciousness and an absence of conclusion. Fragmentation is also a recent characteristic with areas of colour brought together as if by accident, colours are relating through juxtaposition rather than by design. As ever, the image is made only by a colour process that has no defined outcome. Rhythm, repetition and spontaneity are indicative of current work, combining both the rational and emotional state of making. Colour itself is both the subject and the image.
Project duration : November 2022 to Spetmeber 2023
Exhibition Storiel dates: 1st July to 23rd September 2023
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