David Royle
2014 - Beardsmore Gallery
Interior Exotics 2014 149 x 152.5cm
In Rorschsch's Garden No24 2012 135 x 127cm
In Rorschsch's Garden No15 2012 112 x 112cm
In Rorschsch's Garden No4 2012 135 x 135cm
In Rorschsch's Garden No7 2012 122 x 112cm
Fire Flower 2014 122 x 91.5cm
Three Blooms 2013 104 x 66cm
Plant & Window 2014 104 x 66cm
Plant & Window 2013 75 x 50.5cm
In Rorschsch's Garden No19 2012 43 x 46cm
In Rorschsch's Garden No18 2012 51 x 40.5cm
In Rorschsch's Garden No22 2012 30.5 x 40.5cm
Rorschach and after.
With the imagination there is often an action/reaction character to the way it moves forward. Having made many complex paintings with a strongly urban feel I now wanted to play with chance and accident. My first blots and gestures grew into an extended series of works on paper and another series of larger canvasses. Quite early on an accidental symmetry emerged and this became the running theme which I titled “In Rorschach’s Garden”, after Hermann Rorschach who developed the famous symmetrical inkblot images much used in psychological character assessment tests in the 1960’s. Also I liked the conceit that, just like Rorschach’s subjects, the viewer here is completely at liberty to see what he or she wants in these works because, being improvisations, I had no specific expressive intention during their making.
The paintings are collections or “gardens” of such images. They have, for me, a sense of vegetable energy. This is taken on further in the two latest paintings in this exhibition which also involve another recurring theme in my work: being inside and looking out, often onto a built-up urban vista. Fantastic exotic plant life blazes and bursts up and across the surface interrupting the geometry of night-lit high-rise buildings.
David Royle, March 2014
With the imagination there is often an action/reaction character to the way it moves forward. Having made many complex paintings with a strongly urban feel I now wanted to play with chance and accident. My first blots and gestures grew into an extended series of works on paper and another series of larger canvasses. Quite early on an accidental symmetry emerged and this became the running theme which I titled “In Rorschach’s Garden”, after Hermann Rorschach who developed the famous symmetrical inkblot images much used in psychological character assessment tests in the 1960’s. Also I liked the conceit that, just like Rorschach’s subjects, the viewer here is completely at liberty to see what he or she wants in these works because, being improvisations, I had no specific expressive intention during their making.
The paintings are collections or “gardens” of such images. They have, for me, a sense of vegetable energy. This is taken on further in the two latest paintings in this exhibition which also involve another recurring theme in my work: being inside and looking out, often onto a built-up urban vista. Fantastic exotic plant life blazes and bursts up and across the surface interrupting the geometry of night-lit high-rise buildings.
David Royle, March 2014