My painting practice has always dealt with formulating an idea from a personally constructed ideographic spatial concept. This is accomplished through developing and exploring a feeling for spatial expression and from finding pictorial elements conveying associative interplay via shape, color, line, gesture space and scale. In the case of the "Constellation Series" the series has developed with a strong connection to both space, line and gesture as the primary visual component. I use titanium white oil stick line form overlapping and intersecting over flat black acrylic as the formal means to my image and to its emergent power and presence. I think of the drawn line as the kinetic means to extend my sense of perception and touch to the making of the work. The initial line trajectories are lightly applied so that they take an immediate recessive position to those that come over and above. The initial drawing of the line originates with an unconscious magnified scribbling technique used originally by the surrealists and later by many abstract expressionist artists. I use a variety of looping line form that produces both tension, and flux against the straight finite edges of the canvas. The curvilinear spatial attitudes of centripetal and centrifugal orbits give flow and direction to the eye producing the organic energy in the image. The sign that the vortex exhibits, and the feeling of speed in its direction and dance contribute to the biomorphic oscillation of both depth and expansion in the work. As I draw, I come out of the space I have been working in. The image, mirrors the accumulated action of the drawing process and what my hand, and mind have thought about. The frontal line systems are carefully selected and painted to a wider density and width to lock down and orchestrate the dynamics of biomorphic activity filling the space beneath. The wider frontal calligraphy creates the first level of illusionary space and verifies the actual flatness of the painting. Simultaneously, this mapping with its varying trajectories and densities invites the viewer to go deeper into the spaces, to find the synthesis of energy and organic interplay,that I negotiate while making the work. In all of these paintings, I make an image in order to know and experience, the limits of my own empirical truth and imaginings. These paintings are made therefore to be self-portraits communicating both my thinking and feeling about what I experienced, and hopefully what you, as viewer, are seeing and feeling also.

Richard Halliday RCA