Find me on Twitter as @cbarlowmarrs
I draw on memories of grasslands, woodlands and the tropics
to create colourful pocket guides to an imaginary world.
I am inspired in equal measure by both science and art. These dual interests stem from a life-long fascination with underlying structure, and the irresistible urge to experiment.
I use techniques developed through trial and error, colouring papers by hand with watercolour, inks, pastels and acrylic glazes, and cutting or tearing these into shapes that I superimpose on coloured or white backgrounds.
The arc is a fundamental element in my art, and can be found in nearly every painting I create.
A detailed cut-paper painting can incorporate 100 or more slivers of colour, many of them the same shape. In some paintings the surface may be built up with as many as five layers of cut and torn papers. The idea is to engage the eye with colour, form and flowing line, so that the more one looks at a painting, the more one sees.
It’s slow-motion work. But the aim is to create a sense of movement, in bas-relief, across a canvas. Sometimes I feel like an animator working frame-by-frame to create a few seconds' worth of dynamic motion across a screen. I also think of subliminal perception, and how the hidden or partly visible structure of a painting influences the viewer.
The surface, edges and composition of a painting are particularly important to me. Positive and negative space are designed to complement each other. I work on each painting "in the round”, turning it as I go, to ensure that it holds together as a composition even when viewed upside-down. When I do this I am also looking for the source of energy in a work of art: it no longer surprises me if a painting, when turned on its side, suddenly comes alive.
In my Edge to Edge series I work across multiple canvases, some of which may be taken apart and reassembled in a new composition. A small-scale example of this is Water Meadow. On a larger scale is Four Seasons, a four-part painting 2.4m high that was commissioned for a private home. Largest of all is Undercurrents, the five metre-long collage which had its debut at the River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames from November 2007 till February 2008.
