Thoughts On My Painting

A note to my brother Mike Hurst

every body of work is really a journey. often for me it’s a journey without a clear destination. that makes it a difficult road. but i’ve learnt that my best work leads me. so i need to be there painting every day and each work points on towards the next. rather than seeing the end point and trying to impose that idea on the painting.

my concerns over the years have been fairly consistent. light, space, expression, the play between abstraction and representation. the landscape. beauty. as i see it.

this new work includes oils and acrylics. picking up the oils again in 2010 opened up new horizons with colour. but then i returned to the acrylics to work with the metallic, iridescent and interference colours. interference colours look cool from one angle and warm from another and change in depth according to the tone of the underpainting. working with these pigments in combination has been like playing with mercury. they change with every shift in angle but illuminate amazingly in the light.

they have been almost impossible to photograph and so most are not represented on the website. that’s frustrating. but really it’s about experiencing the paintings. you can’t ever reduce that to a jpg on a screen.

it feels good to be at this point in the journey.
one more painting to finish.
the truck comes on monday.

Anita Hochman, 2012