Fish Triptych. Four in One. ParallaxAF aftermath.

The Parallax Art Fair turned out to be like nothing I've ever experienced before. A million artists. Ten billion people looking. Each artist with 5 square inches of space. Temperature under thew lights reaching 200ºc. Well if I'm going to exaggerate for effect I may as well go all the way. It wasn't so much the size of the wall space, which was as expected, but the incredibly limited viewing space - you couldn't back further away than 2 metres from a painting without bumping into another painting. That's if you didn't bump into 14 other people at the same time, or pass out under the lights. Interestingly the part I took part in was billed as "abstract" - but at least a quarter of the work being shown was figurative. Of those my favourite was Jonathan Alibone with his pervy ladybird-book-style watercolours - hilarious. Of the abstract artists I loved Marcello Scarselli whose paintings I really loved. I tried to convince his friend there looking after his space to do a swap for one of mine, but it was at this point he lost his ability to speak English. Shame.

So I have taken something else from him instead, as you can see in my latest paintings below:

Four in One

Fish triptych

I have extended my use of layers of colour done in various media - oil, acrylic, spray paint, and extended and clarified use of symbols. And I guess neatened things up a bit. The triptych was done differently to the other two triptychs I have done. In the first I joined the three canvases together after painting thewm. In the second I haven't joined them together at all, because I like them on the wall with a small gap between them. In this one they were joined together part way through the process - actually in a way at the start - because at the point I joined them they were three separate paintings, and I decided to make them just one painting with three canvases joined. Yet the fact of them being three separate canvases changed the way I painted. I liked this, so took the fourth painting I was working on while these were drying, and took the idea further by dividing on a single canvas. By four, as it was the fourth. This kind of makes sense to me anyway!

As for sizes, the triptych is 100x45cm, the 4 in 1 is 35x50cm.