Andrew Charleson [AKA Andrew Gallacher] Artist's Portfolio
Project: The Eternal, The Transitory and The Absolute
The Eternal, The Transitory and The Absolute
Thirty-one contemporary abstract works presented in a limited edition fine art publication.
Andrew Charleson explores the transitional hinterland between inner world experience and external world impression.
His motivation is to envision where penetration occurs from one zone into the other and to express this abstractive incursion visually.
In The Eternal (the Naiad series) the starting point is place. In nature, informed by water, trees and tranquillity he expresses the perception of spirituality using the mythic and the romantic to connect colour to the idea of the numinous.
In The Transitory (the Chromurus series) past, present and future are imagined as powerful complex snapshots of emotion soaked into the loquacious stones of an ancient castle wall. Lust and greed, love and pain, hope and despair and strife and sacrifice are juxtaposed as colour conflicts fighting against the rigid fortified structure which both protects and confines.
In The Absolute (the Trance series) the starting point is internal and an attempt is made to strip away irrelevancy and to express nothing but the essential. Made as ‘musical drawings’ the content expresses both contradiction, tension and opposition and conversely harmony, counterpoint and rhythm.
The unifying factor for this series of images is one of synaesthesic resonance. They mark a journey from Representationalism (The Eternal) through associative forms (The Transitory) and into what might be described as post modern Suprematism (The Absolute).
There is also significance in the use of digital techniques to express that which is most human. By charting the borders between the inner world and the external world as an essentially binary resonance he reflects on the paradox of using a global, and comparatively recent resource for undertaking the most intimate and personal of age-old conceptual journeys.
With photography and digital manipulation, and with the creation of abstract images by purely digital means, I produced a book of images and a number of digital prints 40"x 30"mounted on aluminium dibond for display.
Trance
Chromurus
Naiad
Concepts and experimentation behind The Eternal, The Transitory and The Absolute
Digital Video, 5 mins, from a PowerPoint presentation