Riverbend | Tim Allen

“‘Riverbend’ is initially a specific location but then becomes a launching point to create an imagined and remembered sense of place. This is an immersive landscape, one to experience temporally, to move through at leisure. The landscape exists as a vehicle for reflection in both senses of the word.

The series is also partly a homage to Nolan’s elegiac multi-panel paintings of the same name.

At the heart of my painting is a paradox; an expressive, bold, immediate and spontaneous mark-making within a process that has structure, discipline and a sense of stillness and contemplation. In my painting there is a continuous negotiation between chance and calculation, expression and description.

I am constantly pursuing the thought ‘what can the paint do?’ Thin or thick, wet or dry, opaque or translucent – and the infinite nuanced stages within those polarities. Each painting with dozens of quick and free layers; the drying time between layers providing the space for contemplation. A bold painted mark is loaded with memory, movement, catharsis, emotion. If, upon standing back, that same mark also suggests form, contour or reflection then I’ve got a painting on the go.”

Tim Allen