An Exploration Of Colour And Form
1970s: As a child, I remember seeing shop sign-painters at work painting the fascia boards in the little town my mother came from. Something about this ‘artisanal artistry’ made me want to become a sign-painter back then! More recently I have realised, through my painting evolution, that this precise calligraphic method is still an influence on how I paint more than fifty years on. My other childhood artistic obsession was Walt Disney’s animated characters which I drew and painted repeatedly, trying to perfect what I regarded as the ‘true essence’ of whichever character I was focusing on. This may seem a strange way to think about a cartoon character, but I believed there was an ideal Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, etc, and only that ideal was of interest! The cartoonists also worked at developing the characters and their features over time so I wasn’t alone in my idealisation of these unreal beings!
2012 – 2022: My adult painting style began in a Social Realist manner, the emerging overriding factor quickly establishing itself as colour. This interest in colour gradually shifted my focus away from straightforward realism/ representationalism and more towards ‘colour for its own sake’, under the strong influence of the Post-Impressionist masters: Van Gogh, Bonnard, Matisse, Derain (Fauvism), Der Blaue Reiter, The Pont-Aven School (Gauguin, Bernard, Cloisonnism).
Men At Work I – 2015
“Remember that a painting – before being a battle horse, a nude woman, or an anecdote of some sort – is essentially a flat surface covered with colours, put together in a certain order”. (Maurice Denis, 1890)
2022 – 2024: Continuing in this tendency towards Cloisonnism (compartmentalisation of discrete colour areas – the ‘Disney-fication’ connection!), and having adopted the Denis quote as a quite literal guiding principle, I became influenced by geometric abstract artists – Mondrian and De Stijl, late Cubism (Leger, Gleizes, The Delaunays), Suprematism and others including Kupka and Riley – primarily as their objective was less about the distraction of subject matter which I started to feel was getting in the way of my core motivation – colour exploration. I started to incorporate white grids into my new compositions, to separate areas of PURE COLOUR, sometimes using gradations of colour, or alternatively, to create colour-based constructions – independent, organised colour paintings adhering to specific aesthetic principles: order, harmony, purity, 2 dimensionality, ratio/ proportion, mood, musical analogue.
Radiator – 2023
2025: My approach has naturally evolved from the previous period in acknowledgement of the contemporary relevance of a motif as the basis of a painting, (even when the paintings were based on geometrical forms I realised that these could become ‘distracting subjects’ just as much as any representational forms of the real world). As a consequence, my process has moved into a ‘motif-based’ phase – between abstracting from real world motifs (no longer the dominant subjects), to a geometricising of forms, directed by the ever-important organising principle – COLOUR. Construction seems to be a key term for these works, including its various familial derivatives (deconstruction, reconstruction, destruction). I regularly use these terms in the painting titles also, sometimes incorporating colour coding to delineate the form of ‘struct’ involved. Painting technique is less important to me than bold colour saturation of the ground/ canvas. Current influences include Auerbach, Diebenkorn, Leger and Russian Constructivism.
‘Cambaud’ – DeConstruction V – 2026
Exhibitions
2013: Pavilion Gallery, Tower Hamlets, London.
2017: The Haberdashery, Stoke Newington, London.
2022: Cass Art, Islington, London.
2023: Wanstead Library, Redbridge, London.
2025: Chapel Gallery, St Margaret’s House, Bethnal Green, London.
2026: Summer Exhibition, St Margaret’s House, Bethnal Green, London.
Paul McMichael, 2026.
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