Min Angel
Dot Dot Dash Dash
Jackson's Painting Prize 2023, Bankside Gallery 2023
Acrylic, Ink, Watercolour, Pastel
Canvas
76 x 96.5 cm
£2,185
“I am curious about the cosmos and the otherworldly, transformation and enchantment. About altered states and inter-being and stories and belief systems which are tightly woven into our conditioning and everyday lives. I have a daily practice of Zen meditation and Qigong and the principles of flow and cosmic energy as life force inform my art practice. I move between figuration and abstraction, the painterly and pictorial.
Working with intuition and imagination, in wet and dry mediums, I use different processes as base ingredients from which I push and pull images and marks in a constant exploration of what can be. ‘Dot Dot Dash Dash’ began not with an idea, but with the rolling of gesso onto an unprimed canvas and sitting with the marks until forms begin to show themselves. Drawing them out with charcoal and working into with paint until a coherent composition came into being and the narrative showed itself to me.
The figures are from my imagination, informed by the library of visual memories from years of looking at paintings, from novels and childhood reminiscences. There is a carnivalesque and mythological nature to the figures, the rearing horse, the bear, the chimera, the cherubs and the figure stirring the bowl which I came to think of as casting spells. Elements come forward and recede as the paint surface is fractured by dots and dashes and finger prints. The repetition in the title references these marks, which serve as a form of language and imitate the casting of a spell.”