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Chopin’s Nocturnes are astonishingly beautiful piano pieces which combine elegant delicacy with innovative harmonic invention. They were the original inspiration behind the paintings in this exhibition. Schumann, an exact contemporary, perceptively described Chopin’s music as containing ‘guns buried in flowers.’ This phrase was the clue I needed to help start me off on this series of paintings. From the start I visualised the paintings to be almost pure white; the project was an exercise in minimalism and pictorial limitation, something to stretch myself both technically and in terms of graphic motifs. It might be a little perverse to conceive these miniatures as bright and luminous since, by definition, a Nocturne is concerned with night-time and perhaps moonlight; darker tonalities might more readily spring to mind. But Chopin’s little jewel-like pieces have a distinct luminosity and purity which, to my sensibility, emerges as pale, silvery and radiant. Lighter, whiter pigments therefore seemed to me to convey these particular qualities. Pages of Chopin’s piano scores came in useful in building up the paintings’ surfaces and creating varied, collage-like textures. Some of the musical texts occasionally breathe through the upper veils of pigment, like small secrets revealed beneath worn-down veneers and coatings.
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© 2007, Gerard Hastings |