While it would seem that my work has changed dramatically, in fact it is a way of working that really began long ago, when I was influenced as a young artist by abstract expressionism. But before I address the abstract work of the last four years, let me attempt to define this term. Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 5 th edition, states that “abstraction” is “a withdrawal from worldly objects….a visionary notion”. A definition of “abstract” is “expressing a quality apart from any object”.

I have concluded that any visual experience, no matter how direct and simple, is exceedingly complex. For years I taught my students that cubism added the fourth dimension, time—in that the multiple viewpoints automatically incorporated the element of physical time. Paradoxically, or additionally, it would appear that the cubists negated the Renaissance illusion of space, and replaced it with two dimensionality (respect for the flat canvas or panel). While this is debatable, the mental process of visual perception does eliminate “linear” time in that each simple visual experience immediately engages all previous visual experience--from our earliest awareness to the present-- with no regard to hours or years. If, as an example, we concentrate our attention on a red apple, staring fixedly, we unknowingly and unconsciously are “seeing” that apple through all our memories of apples (including color, fruit, perhaps apple trees, harvest time…).

So it wouldn’t be to far fetched to begin linking that apple with the red of a gemstone such as a ruby or a carnelian, or red stained glass, red poppies, or even red tiled roofs, and so on into even more remote and unthought associations. In the end, that simple image of the apple becomes as complex as the mind seeing it—beyond the image itself. This is what propels the artist into a world where time disappears and associations of color transcend the limitations of what we perceive as physical objects. And then we could say that the very color, of itself and unattached to any other element, generates its own excitement, frame of reference, and visual statement to each individual, individually.

The artist begins creating a world of exciting and inspiring interrelationships of structure, dimension, line, color, space…. Thus it should not be surprising that the viewer and the artist have a wide sphere of correlated experience in a work which would at first seem to the viewer “undecipherable”. Here’s a true story that illustrates this. When I was creating the “Blue Emerald” paintings, I gave one canvas piece the title “Paris Metro: Faure Stop". The movement and rhythm of the geometric shapes and lines made me think of the metro, but they also seemed to relate to the glorious music of Gabriel Faure. So I made a pun, using a metro “stop” as a reference to an organ stop. And if you are a Parisian, you know that there are no stops with the name “Faure”.

My wife, Jill, insists on titles that are poetic rather than prosaic, so that we can remember more easily the many paintings I produce. So the painting is in a gallery. A passer by sees it from the window. He walks in and exclaims to the director of the gallery, “I’ve been there! That’s the Paris Metro!” He buys the painting, and subsequently I hear this story. I rest my case. I made up that title as a means of identification for that painting, which had no figurative element of either the metro or Faure’s music. I marvel that viewers of my work often recognize what I felt, and expressed if you will, “abstractly”.

Peter Stilton

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