Colin
Ainsworth

It can be said of my paintings that they are abstract, colourful, sometimes humorous, small-scale, occasionally based loosely on landscape or my responses to places and events. The starting points are many and various, and a work may evolve through many stages, sometimes with collage or reworking shapes and colours, until they ‘fit’ a visual sense of completion. The reasons or motivations for this approach become more difficult for me to explain. Despite 30 years experience as an artist, I find it a challenge to talk about my art.

There are themes and methods that have emerged, and these are inevitable indicators of who I am as an artist. My themes reveal my interest in certain special places and experiences: such as India, Wales and Cornwall; and in the experience of being in the landscape and of flying; the wonder of water, the sea and the shore; the magic of listening to music and the act of seeing; immersion in love, joy, play, loss and grief; and the powerful subliminal realm of signs, symbols and dreams. It is clear to me that the paintings I produce, and the way I respond to them, is very much like real life, running in cycles over time. Sometimes these cycles fit neatly into strong identifiable themes, such as the ones mentioned above, or sometimes the paintings are more simply related to the materials and methods being used, such as collage or spray-painting.

My methods have been described by others as being intuitive, exploratory and based on chance. Art critic and writer David Briers wrote, “Ainsworth is one of those artists whose work evades categorization by either of the equivocal terms ‘abstract’ or ‘figurative’. Inasmuch as he seeks to establish a self-sufficient pictorial reality separate from a descriptive or anecdotal role, he is working firmly within the twentieth century tradition of abstract painting, and yet, as he says himself, “The more abstract, the less intentionally descriptive the pictures become, the more I sense a glimmer of reality in them”¹.

I produce many paintings I call “landscapes”, but I am not a traditional landscape painter. My paintings are more often to do with intense connection with the experience of a place or topic through the materials being used than with an analytical study of a subject or motif. I am not in the habit of making preliminary drawings or paintings. At least, I do not work in a linear fashion by analyzing an image before commencing a final piece. I treat everything I do as a potential final piece, although in doing this many pieces of work fall along the way into the recycling drawer to be used as elements of other works, or eventually scrapped altogether. My motivation, methods, materials and the point at which one stops working on a piece, I keep under review. This gives me a critical base from which to assess the results, along with feedback from viewers and collectors.

For me, the titles of paintings are very important, and they may well offer an interpretation of the piece, though it is rare for me to produce a painting with a specific meaning in mind. Artist Martin Fidler said, “Colin’s titles are often teasing signposts along a ‘painted road’ where he has left his baggage of realism behind”² . In the end I believe that it can be left to the viewer to engage in their own way with each painting, and find their own parallels or meanings in it. This encourages a personal response from the viewer, comparable to the way in which many people engage with music.

¹© Swansea Museums Service and David Briers 1986 ISBN 0 903189 20 8
²© Martin Fidler 1992