D A V E B A R N E T T
“I think that art should be an amalgamation of all that the painter has experienced. It can never be all-inclusive, but is filtered, as it were, through one's consciousness, arriving on the canvas as a reduction from the whole.
Art is, or should be, a culmination, a gathering point of one's
experience of existence.”... D. Barnett
Songs of the Desert
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air."
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air."
Regardless of a painter’s passion for a certain approach, there invariably comes a time when the artist needs a break from the humdrum that has become tiring or even boring. The final work might not be boring, but the process is what wears thin. What you are seeing here of my recent work is the result of my taking a break from the ordinary. While it might be seen as very contemporary, it is actually retrograde, a looking back, a re-visitation of an old technique that had its origins in the 1960’s. PVA (polyvinyl acetate) image transfer was quite avant-garde then, for this synthetic resin itself was new and found to have many uses. The images seen here might first fit the category of collage, but in the strictest sense, the process is simply another way of painting. The materials used in these mixed media works are: PVA, magazine clippings, inkjet-printed photos, pencil, charcoal pencil and oil pastels. The subject matter in each work varies as to what interested me at the time and which images lent themselves best to the process.