ianwarburton

self portrait with winter coat. oil on canvas 120x20cms head of the painter Rene Caussanel. charcoal 76x68cms head. oil in canvas 30x30cms head, oil on canvas 30x30cms. I have been making a number of references to heads over this last year. It is always something that challenges me. These few are the result of a determined effort to approach each painting as if for the first time . I try to do that each time I make a drawing; I want to ask what am I going to do here, what will work and what won't. I am face to face with the slow degradations of time and that in itself is interesting.  

 Painting now is, as ever, about all sorts of things: it may also be questioned as having any meaning at all but for me to find some meaning I am rereading the Austrian philosopher, Martin Buber and in I and Thou find the following: We are told that man experiences his world. What does this mean? Man goes over the surfaces of things and experiences them. He brings back from them some knowledge of their condition - an experience. He experiences what there is to things. Those who experience do not participate in the world. For the experience is"in them" and not between them and the world. The world does not participate in experience. It allows itself to be experienced, but it is not concerned, for it contributes nothing, and nothing happens to it. Therefore in my experiencing of , in my entering into relation with the world, I make of it what I will and the relationship becomes one which only I in my own way can experience but in doing so it may happen that another can find the...