I was born in Birkenhead; a shipbuilding town in the North West of England on the banks of the river Mersey, close to the stark, melancholic landscapes of North Wales. I trained as a painter and art historian in Liverpool and Manchester, and now live in Leeds. In 2018 I completed a practice-led PhD in Painting at the Royal College of Art, re-considering medium specificity within a contemporary frame. This involved reflecting on the nature of pictures, temporality and surface in respect of both the object and the activity of painting. Though as a boy I enjoyed drawing, I enjoyed filling-in more. I was exposed to art early, through library books and visits to local galleries. Victorian paintings and reproductions of works by Brueghel, Bosch, Constable, Turner and Monet affected me a great deal, as did works by the Dutch still life painters and the flowers of Fantin Latour. As a teenager I immersed myself in the paintings of Friedrich, Van Gogh, Picasso, Utrillo, De Stael and Bacon
This paper takes Patrick Heron’s assertion as to the abstract nature of painting as a starting point for a phenomenological investigation into the ways in which abstract works comport themselves. How is it that abstract paintings become meaningful, and along which communicative channels might meaning flow? Perhaps in opposition to Picasso’s denial of the possibility of abstract art, and affirmation of the vitality of figurative painting (his restatement of, “the power of the object”), Heron presented an alternative idea; declaring all paintings to be, in effect, of the abstract . In positing an abstract primacy to one’s experience of the world in painting – Heron’s proposition, I will argue, opens more doors than it closes. In support of his hypothesis, Heron drew together the terms space , colour and form – the bedrock of countless claims as to abstraction’s truth – and invoked an, “abstract reality” that painting (including that which is usually taken to be fi