Gary Power

Drawings and Paintings on Paper

Ink, Watercolour, Collage, Stencil- printing

These works employ a combination of drawing, painting, stencil printing, and collage to create intricate and overlapping matrices of spatial tessellations. The marks are initially produced quite freely as drawings with a loose and semi organised structure of marks and lines. These are then systematically cut and rearranged as horizontal strips to create an unpredicted fragmented symmetrical and asymmetrical organised grid, interspersed and interrupted by more disorderly and disjunctive elements.

This process of production combines a balance between order, chance, and subjectivity. The interplay between vertical and horizontal structural mark making creates a surface web of interlocking and interdependent informal geometry akin to the warp and weft and materiality of textiles. This matrix is sometimes overlaid with other geometries, to create a more ambiguous spatial illusion suggesting depth. In other works an image may be screened, obscured, or floating on an ambiguous plane suggesting a partial and furtive view or threshold to another space. The serial composition of repeated marks, are never exactly replicating each other, yet there is a sense of repetition within variation. This rhythm creates a kind of musical notation or calligraphy that can be read as a kind of coloured and gestural visual script registering duration and movement.

Colour is used to suggest shifting patterns of light and shade. The choice of colour is sometimes inspired by the local rural landscape, or other locations and experiences, or is more abstract. The work aims to achieve an overall sense of balance and harmony, an ambiguous sense of pictorial space, and a feeling of interdependence between things.