Portals & Visions

My portal paintings began out of a need to expand the parameters of my work. Up to that point my work was essentially about placing objects in glass vessels. To some degree this felt a little limiting. So I wanted to experiment further with the notion of glass as a metaphor for capturing and preserving beauty. With the portals I moved on from any direct reference to a specific glass vessel, and began exploring ways of creating glass vessels from the imagination.

Now my portal paintings were sealed completely – no longer in open-ended bowls. My still-life objects were now entirely sealed within, as though trapped in amber. To truly use the metaphor of capturing and preserving, it seemed that sealing the objects inside glass would be a natural evolution of my original idea. So I purchased a glass ball and began to photograph it, looking for interesting ways the glass would reflect, and then digitally modifying this image.

Now the portal image had become round, such that I no longer required a square canvas. I experimented with painting on circular panels of wood such that the glass ball could float free of any square encasement. Liberating the image from the square meant I did not have to suggest a ‘roundness’ in a painting. Now I physically had that roundness which made the portal illusion seem stronger.

The portals were also where I stopped physically placing objects in glass vessels and photographing them. Rather, I began to separate the process. The objects were photographed. Then the glass was photographed. Then in the computer the two were digitally fused. You cannot, of course, place fruit and flowers inside a glass ball and photograph it. So the image is generated. In this sense it is more creative because the object has never existed anywhere, and never will exist anywhere, other than in my own imagination, and on the canvas.

In our home we always had a collection of glass paperweights – which of course were art objects, not utility devices. I’ve always been fascinated by the inner worlds created within them: the patterns of light and colour, the exquisite details, the suggestion of natural objects within, flowers or sea-life perhaps. I always know when one of these ‘paperweights’ is particularly successful because I cannot take my gaze off it. And this is really the benchmark I have transferred to my portals to determine whether they are successful or not: if I can not take my gaze off the portal, if it mesmerises me, then it is successful.