Joey George
About
These landscape paintings have been arranged as portraits, creating an augmented, symbolic view of the landscape. The portrait format takes away the sense of familiarity we have when looking at a landscape painting in its usual form and leads us naturally into the unknown.
This comes from the artist’s own fascination with the unknown, with processes, and with a willingness to explore portals into difficult territory in order to define and identify ourselves and our place in the world away from the constraints and coercion of organised ideologies. Working vertically in this way, from earth to the heavens and vice versa, leans into the very different energies inherent of these “places” - dark versus light, reality versus escape, boundaries and brevity versus eternity.
Over the year Joey’s work has become increasingly abstract. His questions have evolved from: “can I suggest a cloud or a tree instead of painting one?” to “how can I suggest that matter?”, moving further away from literalism. In doing so, Joey discovered he was tapping into deeper imaginative potential, using suggestion more akin to the sensibilities of a poet.