About my painting

My abstract paintings are improvisations, starting from the blank canvas with few preconceptions about where the painting will end up. Each mark, each shape suggests the next. It’s a very intuitive process. I find if I can keep the thinking, naming part of my brain out of the picture while staying responsive to what’s happening on the picture surface, I stand a chance of getting a picture to work.

It is very easy to take a wrong turning with this way of painting. Quite often I am working on top of the many paintings which didn’t quite make it and which I painted out to white again.

And when the paintings work? For me there is beauty and stillness, and a sense of place or landscape often emerges at this point.

It is sometimes difficult to speak about painting because the action takes place in a space beyond words. It is this space which I try to enter when painting. I know when I have got close, when a painting has worked, if whenever I look at that painting - whether the next day, next month, next year - I go back to that place.

David Eyres

October 2003

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