Tim Allen.

At the heart of my painting is a paradox; an expressive, bold, immediate and spontaneous mark-making within a process that has structure, discipline and a sense of stillness and contemplation. In my painting there is a continuous negotiation between chance and calculation, expression and description.

Over the past ten years I’ve made half a dozen trips to Mackay and the surrounding landscapes to paint plein air. These trips have been courtesy of incredible local generosity; being taken to locations requiring both local knowledge and resources. This has been particularly true of trips to the Whitsundays, and it is in the uninhabited islands of the Whitsundays that I have found my subject: the elemental interplay between rock and water.

I am constantly pursuing the thought ‘what can the paint do?’ Thin or thick, wet or dry, opaque or translucent, textured or smooth – and the infinite nuanced stages within those polarities. The rock/water duality is the perfect setting for this initially abstract exploration. Each painting with dozens of quick and loose layers; the drying time between layers providing the contemplation (not planning as such but thinking and looking). A bold painted mark is loaded with memory, movement, catharsis, emotion. If, upon standing back, that same mark also hints at form or contour then I’ve got a painting on the go!

The passage of time is also ever present in these landscapes; permanence and impermanence, movement and stillness, contemplation and action - a landscape subject that echoes the process of the paintings creation.