Vernacular
The agendas of abstraction have naturally changed over the course of the last 50 years, what makes things complicated is that we still have artists using historical methodologies and making work and sometimes an excellent living from the production of work in a philosophical paradigm which has had it's time as a current and informed practice. e.g. Gretchen Albrecht and Max Gimblett. In the 60s with the advent of pop, conceptual art, photorealism, body art etc it looked like abstraction was down for the count, but it came back again, even though its return was something like a zombie. New abstraction held little of the values of it's parent forms, even though it has some physical family resemblances, contemporary abstraction is full of double codedness, contamination and the absence of pure and unified views. It's got irony and humour and playfulness which contradicts the gratuitous psychological heavyweight agendas of old school abstract expressionism.
This selection of work represents my current methodology within contemporary painting which could be could be described as late Post-Modern Abstraction .The works imagery is derived from the vernacular forms of Hard-edge Abstraction, Minimalism, Neo-geo Abstraction, Op- art and various references to Modernist and New Modernist Design. The distinctions between these Modernist traditions and my work is, that rather than isolating a signature collection of compositional and colourist elements, which implies the concept of authorial invention, innovation and novelty, I explore the appropriation and recycling of historical abstract visual art rhetoric’s decaffeinated of their utopic belief in progress, singularity, hierarchy, linearity and sincerity. Like most Post-Modernist my work critiques the tenets of Modernism and recognizes the ultimate failure of this convention to produce a coherent gramma or rules for interpretation and meaning which could be used in pubic agreement about abstract artefacts in visual arts discourse. This is something I’ve described as “New Language Fallacy” you can hear it being proposed in the ideas of Kandinsky, Mondrian, Rothko and Motherwell. Alternatively in my work rather than proposing a singular teleological direction for art, I explore a pluralistic range of references to earlier “language Games” within the discourse of Hard-edge Abstraction visual arts and design. Combining the ‘Family Resemblance’ attributes of these various dialects throughout my work creates double -coded hybridity’s in single works and at other times metonymic hybridity generally as a result of pluralism across my whole practice .Like a linguistic etymology of dialectical samples, my work reports anthropologically on the prior life of visual languages and their historical semantic meaning. ‘The Form of Linguistic Life’ is there for observation, and something of the phenomena’s previous capacities can be known by inference about historical cultural aspirations, values and use. But in my work they have come back as the living dead, contextually displaced but still resonating anticipatorily, ironically carried over with a grandiosity of scale and exuberance of colour which suggests utopian coherence and cultural life. I limit my citations and stylistic references to the homogenic areas I suggested above, this adds to the appearance of visual cohesiveness and strengthens the ironic subtext. I use a variety of methods for making work, digital printing, CNG cut panels, screen printing, and hard edge vinyl stencil masked painting techniques, and industrial spray painting methods, all which have a mechanical distancing of the artists hand from expressive engagement with media, because I don’t believe in any notion of authenticity outside of the strategic limits of the rules and the stylistic and formal limitations of flat vector abstraction and the limitations of the technical production methods I am currently using.
Vernacular List of Works
1. Pentobarbital.2017.Ink on Synthetic Canvas.

Sky blue and Pentobarbital blue, a gag on sky blue utopia and death, Pentobarbital being a drug used to euthanize animals. A satirical re- working of old arts narrative agendas of representing religious meaning, beauty and death. A secondary play on op art and math textbook cover design in the formal optical features of the work. And hard-edge abstraction and minimalism.

2. Vernacular .2017. Ink on Synthetic Canvas.

Black and Blue .A play on the appropriation and re-working of op and hard edge (decaffeinated of high idealism of course), a metonymic summary of general strategy in my work. Op art and hard edge abstraction references in formal features of the work. Anti-utopic with the promise of utopian value and progress.
3. Red Eight .2017. Ink on Synthetic Canvas.

Red motif on orange ground . As above, a play on the appropriation and re-working of op and hard edge and modernist typography .A metonymic summary of general strategy in my work. Appropriation ,double coding, deconstruction and value hierarchy flattering of prior concepts of Op art, Modernist Typography and Hard edge abstraction references in the formal features of the work.

4. High Score2.017 Ink on Synthetic Canvas.
See below

Pink and blue. As above regarding general methodology but with a specific double coded reference to a serial killers High Score of 95 for the most homicides, stats derived from a true crime publication on murder cases. References to Op, Modernist Typography and Hard edge abstraction in the physical features of the work.
4 Digital Paintings
1. Pentobarbital.2017.Ink on Synthetic Canvas.1400 mm x 1700 mm

2. Vernacular .2017. Ink on Synthetic Canvas. 1400 mm x 1700 mm

3. Red Eight .2017. Ink on Synthetic Canvas. 1400 mm x 1700 mm

4. High Score2.017 Ink on Synthetic Canvas. 1400 mm x 1700 mm