Current Projects - John Renshaw

Current research is situated at an interface between pedagogy and artistic practice. Particular concerns are issues surrounding the practice of drawing and the phenomenology of a perceptual and creative process.

Recent paintings:

A specific intention is to allow paintings and drawings to exist not only as visual propositions, but to also serve as signifiers or catalysts leading ultimately to a collection of related photographs. Such images, (prompted by an intuitive response to clues contained within the paintings and drawings), seek to negotiate both visual and conceptual correspondences, raising questions concerning relationships between both forms of visual representation. This ‘visual exchange’ or ‘transaction’ relates both to my position as maker /originator and as ‘interpreter ’- perhaps extending some form of critical engagement beyond the paintings and drawings themselves. The extent to which this process evokes connections with the practices of appropriation and ambiguity raises some interesting questions and remains clearly situated within a context of the visible. As the person who creates the work, I become, by definition, not only witness to the process and experience of its making, but must finally confront the outcome. As Duchamp observed ‘It is spectators who make paintings’.