john vinton

My painting is very much about place. How does a place feel. What are its essential qualities. Why is it so moving. In this sense, I’m also a landscape painter but using abstraction as a way to express this sense of place. Like the NY painters, I encourage process incident to be part of the work relying on intuition as a guide. I’m very interested in color, texture, the contrast between thick and thin, the variety of marks you can make with the brush, the bristles, the back of the handle, the side, scraping, shaping. Allowing it all to mix, to act on each other, creating a spontaneous emerging of the visual, which is what we are after. This means both attending carefully and also letting things go, letting things be what they want to be. I can tell when a painting is done by when it starts to look like itself, beginning to take on a character that is independent of me.