Mar­sha Pearce

Ken­wyn Crichlow's lat­est ex­hi­bi­tion, Rap­ture: Op­ti­mism and Trans­for­ma­tion, opens to­mor­row at 7 pm at Y Art and Fram­ing Gallery. Crichlow is a se­nior lec­tur­er in vi­su­al arts at UWI, whose work has been dis­played both re­gion­al­ly and in­ter­na­tion­al­ly. For the artist, his new works rep­re­sent a praise song to feel­ings of joy and hope.

"Rap­ture is re­al­ly a promise," Crichlow says. "It is some­thing we as­pire to­wards. This body of work is as­pi­ra­tional. Our so­ci­ety is so cyn­i­cal and there is so much mis­trust. I thought I need­ed to fo­cus on some­thing hope­ful." Crichlow's paint­ings are al­so the re­sult of a per­son­al, psy­cho­log­i­cal process in which he pos­es a num­ber of ques­tions to him­self–ques­tions which de­mand that he jour­ney across time to con­sid­er hu­mankind's ear­ly and still per­sis­tent im­puls­es to cre­ate im­ages.

"The busi­ness about mak­ing art is that every time you make a paint­ing you start from scratch and you have to go back to the ear­li­est paint­ings– from the time peo­ple start­ed mak­ing im­ages. Once you cre­ate any­thing you have to go back to that ze­ro mo­ment. You go back to rea­sons why peo­ple make art and you ask: Why am I do­ing this thing, with this ma­te­r­i­al, in this way?" In his in­ter­ac­tion with a blank can­vas, he ex­pe­ri­ences a kind of rap­ture, which can be un­der­stood as a type of trans­port as his thoughts trav­el to the many mo­ments in time when art­works have been made; when var­i­ous im­age-mak­ers have tak­en emp­ty sur­faces and trans­fig­ured them. Crichlow asks him­self: What am I to make of the blank can­vas? He re­sponds by ap­proach­ing the can­vas with hope, with ex­pectan­cy and op­ti­mism, and at­tempts to trans­form noth­ing in­to some­thing.

Crichlow's new "some­things" are based heav­i­ly on his at­ten­tion to the lan­guage of colour and the ca­pac­i­ty of colour to com­mu­ni­cate ideas of hope and op­por­tu­ni­ty. He con­tin­ues a line of think­ing from his 2008 show, Hope, but he aims to be more di­rect with this ex­hi­bi­tion."In 2008, the paint­ings were touch­ing on sev­er­al dif­fer­ent things. This ex­hi­bi­tion fo­cus­es more clear­ly, I hope, on a body of ideas through my re­strict­ed use of colours."The paint­ings in this ex­hi­bi­tion have all been cre­at­ed with blue as a foun­da­tion colour. Crichlow then moves from blue to ad­dress colour con­trasts and har­monies to give dif­fer­ent can­vas spaces of pos­si­bil­i­ty, spaces he in­vites us to en­ter. "Blue for us means hope. When we see blue skies we say to­day is a day to do some­thing.

"The oth­er side of blue is black. Out­er space ap­pears black. The blue is the space we in­hab­it."I start the paint­ings with vari­a­tions of blue as a base like in mu­sic. Blue be­comes a chord. From blue I can go to the con­trast­ing colour of or­ange, then I can in­crease the vi­bra­tions with red."In mu­sic it would be like soar­ing through to a crescen­do. From blue I might go to green and then take the in­ten­si­ty of green up by mov­ing to yel­low. The process is built very much on ex­tem­po­ris­ing–mak­ing up, with­out mak­ing do," he says."A square can­vas is one of the most dif­fi­cult for­mats to com­pose," he ex­plains.

Crichlow at­tempts to trans­form the square can­vas such that the space opens up and the vi­sion does not feel boxed in."Paint­ings like At the Edge of a Third Di­men­sion give a sense of deep space. We feel like we must push past hang­ing fronds of blue to get to glows of or­ange in the dis­tance."In Qui­et Storm, Crichlow plays with the mar­gins of the can­vas. He teas­es our vi­su­al per­cep­tion with a cen­trifu­gal force es­tab­lished by way of strate­gi­cal­ly po­si­tioned curvi­lin­ear ges­tures of a whirl­wind or spi­ral so that the square space is trans­formed in­to a more cir­cu­lar one.With this art-mak­ing process char­ac­terised by both im­pro­vi­sa­tion and de­lib­er­ate ef­forts, Crichlow's sig­na­ture use of dots of paint re­mains ev­i­dent. His flecks of colour give vi­tal­i­ty to the con­cept of hope, as clus­ters of dots seem to vi­brate on the can­vas. Each dot is dif­fer­ent, has a unique per­son­al­i­ty, and the artist is al­ways in search of the dot that will be the con­clud­ing mark that re­solves his paint­ed com­po­si­tions."With each dot you feel that is the touch that will breathe the life in­to the work. As I work I am al­ways con­sid­er­ing which dot is go­ing to bring the piece to life; which one is go­ing to say: not an­oth­er mark," says Crichlow.

His paint­ings may be seen as non­rep­re­sen­ta­tion­al or ab­stract ren­der­ings of con­cepts such as hope and op­ti­mism, which are them­selves ab­stract.Yet Crichlow in­sists, "The work is not ab­stract. It is based on re­al ex­pe­ri­ences that I have had, ex­pe­ri­ences that I hope we all have had. We all wake up and ex­pe­ri­ence the sun com­ing out of clouds. The work asks us to re­flect on our own ex­pe­ri­ences."