You’re reading this text on Earth using your eyes that are both more or less spherical; the retina is more or less hemispherical; the pupil is more or less circular. The visual field of one eye is nearly a circle; it may be slightly wider at the horizon. The visual field of two eyes together is thus two overlapping circles. The earth is almost a sphere, technically it is an oblate spheroid because it is bulging by 43km at the equator, caused by the spinning motion of the earth. Much like how spinning pizza dough in the air causes it to flatten due to centrifugal force.
A painting is often an attempt to paint the illusion of three dimensions, be it a still life or abstract. Depth, space – a window to the world. The Rolling Pin Paintings are made to break this illusion, they are very flat. My paint leaves the tube in a three dimensional form, a daube or a blob. I use my ‘Rolling Pin’ to roll it flat. During the ‘rolling’ a shape emerges from this action. Much like the attempt to lay an intact orange peel flat. The paint is rolled with an implement designed for rolling dough or pastry. The forms that emerge appear anamorphic, stretched and dilated. Colours collide with the rolling, the action creates the composition using the location of the paints application as their starting points. Like a journey undertaken when a destination is unknown, the painting materialises with the action. The action reveals a form that is meant to be. I act as facilitator, allowing what is meant to be, to emerge. The colours are emotimaticaly selected on the day the painting is made. In a world of skeumorphic illusion these works are ‘flat’, a search for a meaningful truth. Not attempting to appear like something it is not, but embracing everything that it truly is. I invite the viewer to view these work dead straight, as flat and directly as possible. These paintings are illusions of nets for three dimensional shapes. Impossible two dimensional renderings of three dimensional space, flat space, flat 3D, 3D flat, 2D paintings for a 3D world.
The by-product of making Rolling Pin Paintings are sheets of paper where rolled shapes and colours haphazardly overlapped. These sheets have been used like blotting paper, removing access paint from the wood canvas so the paint achieved a very flat application. My attention was focused on the creation of the paintings, and zero creative thought was directed at these sheets. After a stack had amassed I felt the need to work with them. Like making a meal from combining leftover food, forcing combinations of ingredients to work with a desire to be economical and avoid waste. In the same vain I treated each sheet as a leftover, collaging them together, seeking moments of serendipity, alignment and harmony attempting to understand the fluid nature of colour and its relationship to form. Like abstract still life’s, all the fruits in a bowl in one ripe object. Fluid rolled forms coaxed into existence. Colours meet, the edge extends, a form emerges.