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'Pathways Into Solitude'
Oliver Murdock, David East,
Zari Gallery, 2023
Oliver Murdock and David J East are two artists from West Yorkshire with an interest in painting as a psychological tool. Through the production of abstract, textured canvases they seek, in different ways, to shed light on the contours of interior states.
With a background as a filmmaker, David's canvases have a pulsing, rhythmic quality redolent of naturally occurring phenomena- forests, storms, skies. His canvases have an all-encompassing, cinematic quality, a sense of a world encapsulated within a frame.
His relationship with painting is shaped by the need for solitude in a hectic, uncertain climate.
The work shown here by Oliver Murdock draws on the themes of memory and archiving through intuitive and complex patterns. Using oil paints and concentrated gesso primer, he creates textured layers that result in abstract forms.
With flares of intense colour and pinpricks of light, his works reach for a heightened state, a place for the re-setting and rerouting of neural pathways.Repeated patterns reflect particular experiences of mental health in the hope of finding a pathway into equilibrium and solitude.
As a contemporary artist, Oliver believes that this use of visual communication can help the viewer share empathy with psychological conditions that usually remain unseen.Seen together, the works of these two artists speak to a commingling of intense psychological states, a sense of solitude as companionability and support.
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Oliver Murdock is a contemporary, abstract artist whose work visually communicates psychological experience as a means of illuminating issues around mental health. His multidisciplinary practice encompasses painting, glass sculpture, sound and installation.
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By rerouting the intrusive thoughts and repetitive phrases characteristic of anxiety he opens up space for a new collective understanding of the condition. Hypnotising memories are layered in sculptural formations subsuming the audience in a previously subjective world. Each piece allows further insight and investigation into hidden layers of human experience.
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David J East is a filmmaker and artist whose experiments with canvas attempt to evoke feelings of peace and solitude. Through painting, he seeks to reach a transcendent state, a place from which to survey a tumult of emotional flux. Working in film has allowed him to work collectively, but in painting he has found a new level of immediacy, a raw engagement with the medium.
His use of texture allows layers to be integrated in the paintings, a sense of images glowing beneath. In the pieces shown here, layers of previous artworks co-exist within the current incarnation. This reimagining of the artwork allows for a sense of other worlds opening, a place for contemplation and solitude.
These works are a visual representation of the artist's time spent in solitude with the paint. These textures, scratches, and rough mountains of paint are worlds in themselves, places in which to solitude, freedom and peace.
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