Usually the painter has full control over the placing and quality of every mark and element in their work. This instead was creation in a straight jacket. The artist's task was to arrange a piece that worked with the discarded offcuts that were available. Apart from the piece in the bottom left corner that didn't 'look right', there was no overpainting. Given the very unpromising source material, the result has a satisfying coherence as an aesthetic system, which is what paintings are fundamentally.

Forget What You Know

Starting out as two separate pieces each about twenty-four inches square, this was executed very quickly with a saw, chisel and brushes, without too much deliberation. The plyboard panels were cut up, combined and arranged loosely. The finished work is disorienting like shell-shock. With the surface of the panels scarred like flesh, what emerges is reminiscent of a landscape blasted by war, of charred, broken limbs and barbed wire.

Barbed Wire in The Blood

A piece that became a fusion of what started out as three separate artworks. The result is a combination of the angular and geometric, contrasted with panels of lyrical, expressive paintwork. The two don't often mix in abstract painting. The portrait orientation, decided at the last minute, makes the piece sit up to meet our gaze and prevents it becoming an abstract 'landscape'. The intent of the title is optimistic; a tribute to creation and possibility in a world without limits.

Anything Can Happen

Inspired by the aesthetic of broken windows; not just the unpredictability of their form, but also the randomness of their destruction. Starting out as a drawing in oils of a broken window, the plyboard was then cut into multiple fragments and re-arranged to create another level of brokenness. A broken, broken window. Then the piece was sawn into unequal quarters and re-arranged. What emerged was menacing black forms crawling into the frame, from left to right it. Looking nothing like a broken window, but with a similar random and jagged beauty that had inspired it in the first place.

Invaders

A painting that started out smaller than it ended. The process went through several different versions and configurations in the twelve months it took to complete.

Blacked Out Stars

A composition fusing geometry and chance, inspired by war and the idea of a mountain range tearing apart seismically. The point where all control is lost. There are two levels of composition. First, the painted design on two panels; white marks on a black background and black marks on a white background. The second level of composition is where the two panels are cut into 45 and 90 degree angle pieces, and then arranged randomly into the final design shown here. An accidental, unintended consequence of the finished work, is the animal skin quality of the design which conceptually serves the work as a metaphor for the competitive and destructive forces that often govern human behaviourThe animal skin quality of the design is an accidental metaphor for the competitive and destructive forces that often govern human behaviour.

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Vincent Driscoll

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