Artists statement
Drawing is my primary practice, it is a tool that reveals, creates and records information.
Drawing has a lucid and deceptive simplicity that renders form and meaning all too quickly the content rapidly and spontaneously manifests itself, arriving on the paper apparently prior to any considered thought process or intention, requiring me to acknowledge what I did not appear to know or may never know.. This rapid and ephemeral nature of the medium has a catalytic effect enabling a ruthless distillation process within the work, enabling me to overlay, obliterate, and edit, to define and derive content.
The drawings can form the basis of paintings, but within this process a reflective analysis to further define intention and direction inevitably gives rise to concepts, and one falls to juxtaposing images and making associations in a desperate, yet rational attempt for understanding. A desire to distil the content, to progress ones work, to define order and meaning and direction, but being ever mindful that it may not lead to certainties or truth of ones place in this world, or the way things are.
These opposing activities of trying to find sense and reason and at the same time accepting that reason may be beyond ones logic in this context creates a dynamic tension; a synthesis of the intimacy of expressive drawing fused with the more considered critical distance of contemporary painting practice.
The drawings themselves appear to be representational, but no specific person or place is visually depicted. It is more a rendering of a specific content, a distilled essence or archetype reminiscent of particular “types” of people, places, everyday objects, and the feelings these universally evoke. The characters are mere figments of the imagination; the works are therefore not a voyeuristic reportage in the traditional sense. They are initiated by memory, feelings and responses; as opposed to the detached critical distance of direct observation.
Chris Milton
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chris milton 