Tone Poems

“As well as colour and music, there is a relationship between colour and language within the painted Tone Poems, with blocks of solid colour organized on a page as a poem might be. These can be sympathetic or discordant experiences. Like poetry, visual art has a limited palette of words / colours, and the meaning and feeling of the works comes from the arrangement of the individual elements. It is the emotional effect of the individual blocks of colour (words) and their relation to each other (sentences) that makes the impact on both our conscious and sub–conscious mind and the serial nature of the overall work that brings out its poetry.”

Chris Keatley – Curator
Pendulum Gallery, Vancouver, BC

Kinetic

This body of work is calligraphic in nature, with each exacting stroke of colour activating the silence of the blank canvas. With these interacting elements, the eye is guided through the painting in a search to both connect with, and de–code, the image. These repetitious elements create visual illustrations of natural forces, such as gravity and inertia and form a work of kinetic art.

Many works in this series are made up of multiple canvases, and serve as a way of further increasing the dynamic relationships within this body of work. These paintings function by way of a physical interplay with one and other; each is a direct metamorphosis of the other. The paintings flow “to and fro” like an animated abstract GIF.

Cut Line Abstractions

In these works the artistic creation is an open–ended play of traces in which the work gives up to a new kind of beauty, one that is mobile and elusive. Each image with its cicatrix seems to deal with the physical world, but give no easy name to their places. In a post structuralist mode, using a non–traditional tool of a knife rather than a brush, Batty explores a tension, juxtaposing the hard edge of the knife with the soft flow of the paint, evoking a sense of infinity.

Also detectable in the work is a similar sensibility to the work of the Futurists, in their attempt to capture movement depicting it so as to convey a sense of dynamism of the contemporary world. These works allow the artist to remain open to the effects of chance, thereby facing his void–activating it with incisions that now mark him, as much as the work he produces. This discovery process is ongoing and non–linear. One edits only to find that the trace of what has been erased has reappeared, indeed, given rise to the eternal return.

S. Fuller–Activating the Void and the Making of Meanings