The Great Irony

There is great irony in the art that I make. One could say it hinges on the paradoxical. I am a visual artist but my work dwells in the essence of the unseen. Pictorial reality depicts the tangible and sets out to define the three-dimensional world. My work does not.

Metaphysically my pieces exist from an expressive standpoint and shine a light on the unseen realities of emotion, energy, frequency and conceptual thought. For all these factors are void of physical matter and actual substance.

I was born with a perceptual phenomenon called synesthesia, where an individual experiences two or more senses at the same time.  Synesthetes may hear colour, visualize sounds, feel the presence of sound or taste colour. I have witnessed this cross over of the senses all my life.

As I developed as an artist and a painter, I noticed that I was able to taste the colours that I was painting as well as visualizing shapes and forms with flavours and sounds. I found myself even feeling a thirst for some colours as well.

My work is absent of any narrative or story, but instead it serendipitously finds it’s origins in a stream of consciousness where the work itself is the subject matter. Statements of colour, movement, process and illusionary depth all combined to create spontaneous moments captured in time. 

Any obvious depiction of reality is non-objectively abstracted and obscured. Colour itself is the main theme in in my paintings, where the notion of art for arts sake better defines the compositions and the over all aesthetic.

Kirk Sutherland