Bob Barron at the Red Box Gallery

The bathers
Oil on card/collage
147 x 94cm

Polar 2
Slate
76 x 60cm
4am
Oil on card/collage
127 x 90cm

 

If my work is about anything, I think it may be an attempt to express vague musings about the passage of time made corporeal through certain images and surfaces; the unfathomable time from which we have emerged, Deep Time; the more immediate time of our recent forebears, Century; the slow pulse of time during the early hours when lights are dimmed so as not to disturb a sleeping household, 4am; a momentary fragment of time when three young women run from the sea, moments that are never to be repeated in the same way ever again, Bathers.

When I say I only think the work may have something to do with the comprehension of time, however, it is because one can never be fully explicit about any work of art. There is always something at one remove, something which cannot be quite pinned down. All the constructs in art we build to describe a thought or feeling are, of necessity, parts of the map and not the territory.

My art has little to say about the world of today, but I would be quite happy to see it as a place of retreat as it is a deliberate remove from a digitally manipulated, glossy everything, advertising culture with an emphasis on instant gratification. I use card that has often been used as packaging for this consumerist society and then discarded. I am not interested in impact as such, but work that reveals itself over time.

According to the Maurice Denis dictum, 'before being a horse, a nude or some sort of anecdote, a work of art is essentially a flat surface covered with colours assembled in a certain order'. So, first and foremost I suppose, my work is essentially about the material I use, assembled in a certain order, torn, stained, scratched or etched into.

I like the idea of working with slate because of the age and nature of the material. Slate is of sedimentary origin, formed from the deposits of minerals collected on the beds of ancient seas millions of years ago. Movement of the earth's crust, retreating seas or whatever, eventually pushed these ancient sea beds to the surface where their deposits were quarried by man to provide shelter from the winds and the rain. I like handing this material, and the way in which the surface has been worn by its exposure to the elements and marked by Man's deposits into the atmosphere. I am interested in the journey from the sea bed to the quarry, from the quarry to the roof top and from the roof top to the art work. To this extent the pieces are about the slate itself but I am also, again, attempting to evoke some feeling of time, ancient landscapes perhaps; something elemental but without any New Age mysticism attached.

Writing about Richard Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series of paintings, Robert Hughes wrote that one heard 'neither the chant of surging millions, nor even the chorus of a movement, but one measured voice, quietly and tersely explaining why this light, this colour, this intrusion of a 30 degree angle into a glazed and modulated field might be valuable in the life of the mind and of feeling.'

I am interested in the life of the mind and of feeling, but, nevertheless, people confronting the work will make of it what they will.

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