Ian Whitmore Artist Statement

My work focuses on dualities of irony/sincerity and figuration/abstraction in contemporary painting. I use the aesthetic vocabulary and improvisational working methods of cathartic abstraction, but I temper this with glimpses of effete and ephemeral subject matter‹ rococo decoration, fashion illustration, advertising, and anachronistic pop imagery. I am interested in the historic hostility in art between Dionysian and Appollonian camps, and its reverberation in contemporary practice. My paintings provoke a question of intent: ³is this a retinal or a textual artwork; is it an object of delectation or of interpretation?²

In materializing these conflicts I am exploiting the inherent capacity of a painting to be two things at once. The ambiguity of intent in my work is compounded by a palimpsestic reworking and layering of images. These images vacillate between inviting interpretation and defying it, as their individual, representative identities collapse back into the abstract, formal cohesiveness of the whole. In order to honestly and directly confront the problems of the medium, a healthy doubt must permeate both the act of painting and its interpretation. My canvases are skirmish fields where issues of form challenge content for supremacy, and where the notion of painting as a vehicle for emotional expression is put into question.