ABSTRACTIONS

"The heart’s desire, as a painter, as a gestural painter, in fact a gestural painter in layers, is to ecstatically see through and express that privilege of consciousness in the immediacy of form, colour, stroke. Because when we look, say at a tree, we revel in the contained explosion of root, trunk, branch, leaf, blossom, fruit; fruit, blossom, leaf, branch, trunk, root. Thrust upwards, waving in the wind, shimmering. To see through that leaf to cell, to molecule, to atom, to energy is the ecstasy of the dervish. The dervish moves like that, is moved by that.

"We are the dervishes of the art world. From that ecstatic move to oneness with energy at the heart of things we fling colour onto canvas. It takes the shape of how we move, our dance. We are the psychic weathervane – turned by the multidimensional infinitely expressive currents of love, the consciousness of love. Burdened as we are by grief, by loss, by impossible desires, by the immense weight of the world, we spin, and throw off images from the unseen world, the world of sudden grace, of unconditional promise, of correspondences and revelations, of surprise.

"Isn’t it?"

—Jo Haines (artist)

People (my family included) still question my determination for leaving realism far behind. During the late eighties, while painting L'Élue, a centenary tribute series to Nijinsky, the god of dance, my "realistic" paint application and gestures, inspired by the movement he was about, just wanted to explode, to push into the unknown, what I personally feel our obligation is as artists of all genres. I love the classics and without them none of what follow would be possible. I had my formation and basic training in and out of school, but comes a moment of realization that one has to travel further. I've been traveling ever since, finding my work to be about light, as in Orion The Hunter defending paradise, or in Courage, a work about hope and the eminent light at the end of the tunnel (both titles are included on these pages).

Comments or a dialogue are welcome.