Thomas Nozkowski

Thomas Nozkowski  Untitled  1983


“With Nozkowski, abstraction becomes an endless adventure in structure, texture, tone and mood. To all evidence, his imagination appears encyclopaedic within the nar­row parameters of the fixed plane. For a strictly non-specific communicator, his pictures are eloquent and articulate, full of humour and pathos and close observation of things half remembered or entirely imagined. With their distorted reminiscences of modernisms past, their misshapen geometries and impossible constructions, and their enigmatic evocations of rustic melodies and caricatures of form, his pictures amount to an infinite catalogue of types, a never-ending sequence of character studies under a regime of relentless difference. They remind me of democracy.”

                                                                         Marc Mayer

Epicurus

Micky Donnelly  Proposition #32  2008/2010  Oil on Fabric on Canvas

                 “Not what we have, but what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.”

                                                                                                        Epicurus

Heuristics

Micky Donnelly  Proposition #28  2008/2010  Oil on Fabric on Canvas

“The creative act is an example of someone working from an internal set of heuristics, or trial-and error models, that has evolved through time. Every hunch, may, in fact, be traced to a heuristic. The feeling an artist has, for instance, that a certain colour would work in a certain place, though they may not be able to describe it in words, can be attributed to a problem-solving strategy which is partly unconscious in nature, and which may involve several trial-and-error models interacting. What is deemed to be truly original does not come from thin air. It is the result of the combinations of and relationships between many heuristics which currently exist within a consciousness, out of which a new heuristic arises, only to be thrown back into the mix. Unexpected moves become necessary for experience, and experience becomes necessary for making further unexpected moves."

                                                     adapted from an anonymous internet text

Gary Stephan

Gary Stephan  Painting of Paintings (light corners)  2009

“We live and breathe until we don't any more, and meanwhile our eyes dart about our environment, hungry for stimulus. The best abstract painting, like Stephan's, rests its legitimacy on a persuasive identification of living with looking. All paintings are consciousness surrogates — fitting over our brains like virtual-reality helmets, such that we experience, as our own, thoughts and feelings that originate elsewhere. Abstraction aims to intensify this transaction's uncanniness, bending consciousness back on itself to make thought the material of thought and feeling the object of feeling.”

                                                                             Peter Schjeldahl

Juan Usle

Juan Usle  Historia con tres nudos  1997

“After a visit to Nepal in I989, Usle resolved that: ‘henceforth he would never repeat a painting... Instead of style there would be attentiveness to the moment. Instead of signature, naturalness.’

The early modernists and most of Usle's contemporaries found and then refined their signature styles. Usle rejects that way of working. Refusing to settle down, he employs Mondrian grids, Reinhardt's black, the brushstrokes of late De Kooning, Newman's zips, Picabia's early machine paintings and a multitude of devices from both the figures of an earlier generation and his contemporaries.”

                                                                              David Carrier

James Elkins

Willem De Kooning  Untitled  1983

“Paint records the most delicate gesture and the most tense. It tells whether the painter sat or stood or crouched in front of the canvas. Paint is a cast made of the painter's movements, a portrait of the painter’s body and thoughts. The muddy moods of oil paints are the painter’s muddy humors, and its brilliant transformations are the painter’s unexpected discoveries. Painting is an unspoken and largely uncognized dialogue, where paint speaks silently in masses and colors and the artist responds in moods. All those meanings are intact in the paintings that hang in museums: they preserve the memory of the tired bodies that made them, the quick jabs, the exhausted truces, the careful nourishing gestures. Painters can sense those motions in the paint even before they notice what the paintings are about. Paint is water and stone, and it is also liquid thought.”

                                                                James Elkins   from What Painting Is 

Noam Chomsky

Micky Donnelly  from  Mapping The Days  2008/2010

“Anarchism, in my view, is an expression of the idea that the burden of proof is always on those who argue that authority and domination are necessary. They have to demonstrate, with powerful argument, that that conclusion is correct. If they cannot, then the institutions they defend should be considered illegitimate. How one should react to illegitimate authority depends on circumstances and conditions: there are no formulas. In the present period, the issues arise across the board, as they commonly do: from personal relations in the family and elsewhere, to the international political/economic order. And anarchist ideas -- challenging authority and insisting that it justify itself -- are appropriate at all levels.”

                                                                                   Noam Chomsky

Raoul De Keyser

Raoul De Keyser   Red Diamond   2006  Oil on Canvas

"De Keyser’s paintings frequently derive from his daily surroundings. Laundry hanging from a clothes line, Venetian blinds, the vapour trails of a plane, a tree next to his house, the lines and shades where two walls meet, the chalk line of a football pitch. The references are still there, but only if you want to see them. More than anything De Keyser’s paintings celebrate painting and as such life itself. It’s just paint on canvas, nothing more, nothing less. There’s no ideology, no meaning, no hidden manifesto and no bravura. Just paint on canvas, but sometimes the paint speaks for itself."

                                                                                                                                   
                                                                                                               Ivar Hagendoorn