Richard Whincop

Technique

I do not like things to be too easy, and the inherent difficulty of representational oil painting presents a challenge. It is a way of testing yourself, putting your skill and imagination on the line. In every painting you run the risk of failure. As it develops, it becomes a visual problem which does not always have an obvious solution. So I alternate periods of intense activity with time spent simply looking, waiting for the way forward to become clear- for the picture to tell me what to do next. In a purely visual sense, a canvas becomes the arena for a dramatic interplay of contrasting tones and colours, and yet where light must serves to bind together the different emotional and intellectual strands into a unified whole.

I cease working on a painting when I feel that I have brought the opposing or contradictory forces within it into some kind of dynamic balance- albeit sometimes tense or precarious. What I seek is an arresting, unified image: yet one in which the meaning is ambiguous and open-ended. My aim is to engage the viewer’s imagination with work that provokes thoughts and feelings, and yet which also chimes with their own experiences; and with a definitive interpretation elusive, my hope is that they will be able to discover new possibilities each time they return to look at it.