Graham Dane
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ABOUT
I was born just west of London and studied Art and Art History at Oxford Brookes University (1984-87), an Advanced Postgraduate Diploma in Painting and Printmaking there concurrent with evening life-drawing classes at St Martin's School of Art, London (1990-91). In 2013 I was awarded a Masters in Art History from Birkbeck College. I teach at UAA's Art Department, am a radio broadcaster and lucky to be married to the artist Linda Infante Lyons. |
ARTIST STATEMENT
The works I make are found on the way to something else and are always unexpected. They’re informed by daily experience, by memories and certain aspects of the world including (but not limited to) virology, bacteria, meteorology, chaos theory, an interest in the notion of the sublime. The sublime evades easy definition. Today the word is used for the most ordinary reasons, for a ‘sublime’ tennis shot or a ‘sublime’ evening. In the history of ideas it has a deeper meaning pointing to the heights of something truly extraordinary or overwhelming, an ideal that artists have long pursued. In the words of Kant, “Whereas the beautiful is limited, the sublime is limitless, so that the mind in the presence of the sublime, attempting to imagine what it cannot, has pain in the failure but pleasure in contemplating the immensity of the attempt.” Abstract painting is the visual equivalence of music. Both use the same vocabulary: tone, harmony, composition, dissonance. We allow one to transport us via our ears into the beyond, to move us. We don’t ask what we ""see"" but how we feel. My goal is to produce works where people don’t care what anything was/is because they’re so enveloped by them. The scholar Joseph Campbell once said, “Historically, one of the functions of the artist is to be a liaison between the Inner and Outer world.” The process is initially a transposition of a drawing - or a combination of elements from several - but quickly becomes trial and error based on a faith that painting can be evocative, a thing in itself. It’s faith in painting as a vehicle, a conjuring of the world beyond the edge of your eyesight acting, at another level, as the history of its own making. Painting, for me, is a concrete manifestation of both emotion and thought. There is no specific interpretation. |
