Welcome to my website where you can view some of my latest artwork.

The overall concern of my artwork is with images that relate to the inner landscape of attentive experience. In particular, images that can be described as being locked within the body of sensation and that emerge out of the process of perceiving bodily sensation through the inner doorway of immanent awareness. In translating and transcribing this inner landscape, what emerges visually on the canvas and the drawing board, is characterised by circular and elliptical patterning in which symbolically, circles and ellipses refer both to eyes and as points of psychodynamic energy.

As well as eyes being the primary organ that we use to make sense of visual form they are also symbolic of awareness and perception beyond the five senses. By fusing archetypal symbols and motifs such as flower like mandala forms, pyramids, eyes and the occasional animal form, with the optical effects of pure geometry, I enable visually coherent images and forms to emerge that have not been seen before. For example, in the painting, ‘Above the Plateau’, my intention was to create an image of the inside of the head, as perceived through the vehicle of vivid awareness. So that, represented at the level of our fleshy eyes, there is a circular ring of eye motifs halfway up the painting, which expands to the top of the picture where a circle represents that sensitive place on the top of the cranium at the crown.

The circles and ellipses I use also act as points of energy and as instances of activity which can be used visually as building blocks to be ordered and combined in an infinite number of ways. In much the same way that the Op artists of the 1960’s, like Bridget Riley and Victor Vasarely worked, these building block cells if combined in creative and imaginative ways can be used to discover new forms of aesthetic experience. My approach to using the optical effects of pure geometry however, differs from the Op artists in as much as it is my wish to let the painterly and textural qualities of real media be uninhibited and unrestrained by the modernist paradigms of formal flatness that prevailed at the time of the inception of Op art. Rather, by allowing expressionistic and painterly qualities and rigorous mathematical opticality to exist side by side, results in a tension that to me is electrifying and immensely satisfying both on a visually formal and content driven level.

If you would like more information about forthcoming work and exhibitions on my artwork please use the contact form on the contact page.

Matthew Yates