During my dabblings with acrylic painting, the most frequently-recurring idea was the attempt to make a painting that looked like a stained-glass window, with eleven examples produced over a six-year period. There were one or two false starts before I settled on a technique which gave the effect I was looking for.
The first painting took a literalistic approach in its geometry, emulating a modernised version of a classic rose window, but the rest of the series tended towards more free-form geometry which I think creates a more interesting effect in this context.
Four of these paintings (III, V, VI and IX) were done on kitchen cupboard doors, which were incorrectly manufactured during a DIY project my Dad was doing; I limited the 'stained-glass' effect to the flat area inside the doors' moulded detailing, with the moulded channel itself and the outer flat area all being left blank (usually black). Stained Glass III used a style of geometry borrowed from the Arc Phase Variations, which I was creating around the same period, but I don't think this transferred successfully; however, the other three door-based pictures in this series remain among my favourite paintings that I've done.
The final two images, reverting to normal canvas, were both created for my friend Tim. Stained Glass X was painted for his birthday in 2014, and this inadvertently sowed the seed for an unusual collaboration which would follow three years later. As Tim was working on his Bachelor of Music degree, the opportunity came up to do a project exploring his synaesthesia - the phenomenon some people experience where they perceive unusual connections between different senses, in Tim's case 'seeing' a different colour for each note of the musical scale. With this in mind, he sent me a graph showing his perceived correlation between notes and colours, and asked me to produce a painting which arranged those colours into a set of sequences, which I did based almost solely on visual considerations as I don't have the musical ability to 'hear' what I was painting; once this was done, he then wrote a piece of music drawing on the note sequences which I had written for him through my selection and arrangement of the given shades. I think it's fair to say that the result wasn't Tim's easiest work to listen to, but it was nevertheless a fascinating exercise, and it laid some important conceptual groundwork which we would revisit for a film project a few years down the line.
