Page 5 - Essay Awakenings Reloaded by Paul McCloskey

Beginning with my previous series of paintings ‘Awakening (the
Alpha)’, a sweeping ‘curve’ leading to the vortex of the landscape has emerged,

its physical influence partly relates to my surroundings of the Wicklow and
Wexford landscape, of hills, deep valleys and sweeping lines where I live. I
have maintained this motif in this series of paintings to varying degrees, as it
adds

considerably to
the drama and
movement in

my paintings,
giving an
organic, almost

panoramic
sense of depth
to the paintings.

Also I feel an
Fig 2. Landscape with Umber. Triptych. Oil on Canvas. 183cm X 91cm
urge to strike

this perfect balance, the ultimate play of light, texture, shape and size. This
recurring element is not entirely new to painting as some painters have spent

their lives exploring variations of singular shapes, such as Josef Albers who is
most famous for his series ‘Homage to the square’ where he explored chromatic

interactions with flat colored squares arranged concentrically, as well as Sean
Scully, who has explored
recurrently horizontal and
vertical stripes in a most

beautiful painterly fashion. .
As John I. H. Bauer states in
‘The New American

Painting’, ‘it is not always
given to me to know what
my pictures ‘look like.’ I

know that I work in a
tension provoked by the

contradictions I find in
painting. I stay on a picture Fig 2a. Landscape with Umber. Detail