Horizon Paintings

The appearance of the natural world meets the experience of painting in John Dougill's new group of paintings.

“In the past his paintings were a response to the changing features of the London sky: vapour trails, sunsets, and the accumulating effects of contamination, witnessed first-hand from his high window near London Bridge. Now that his view is of a newly-built block of luxury flats, he has turned to a long standing fascination with the Sea. Repetition is implicit in this subject as it is in this particular painter's practice; 'renewal' is found in each new encounter. A new sequence of small paintings follows the sea as it ebbs and flows in the consciousness. He has been absorbed by the distant look to the horizon as well as the immediacy of the endless assault on the shore. Where presence is a moment of recognition, the tide-line of memory. (These fragments I have shored against my ruin).”

Exhibition Studio 1.1. Michael Keenan

Coming and going, receding advancing, accumulating, overlapping. A relentless Power.

A physical pleasure and a terror.

To make a painting which is a result of contemplation, of trying to find structured ways of responding to the idea of the sea. It's horizontallity, it's here and there, it's advancing, it's covering. It's repetition.

It's oiliness; solidity and thickness. ? So that it is less to do with description, though it may have resemblance???, perhaps it's neverending ness, so that a painting isn't like a problem solved but moves toward a point of an unknown completion.

John Dougill