Colour 1.

I am currently reading Colour: Documents of Contemporary Art – it’s a collection of essays, thoughts, poetic gestures about the subjects both of colour and colours. It’s editor is David Batchelor, an artist with whose work I was previously unfamiliar.

Attract/Repel has been born of acute inspiration in the form of extreme converse emotional reactions I felt when viewing a work by Dan Flavin (and two keen artist/bloggers’ comments on my post that noted this phenomenon).

Dan Flavin

It’s exciting now, to see if only a small amount of Batchelor’s work online – the similarities and divergences from Flavin’s colour-light pieces.

David Batchelor Saatchi Gallery

Attract/Repel‘s lighting designer also just sent me a link to Bill Culbert. Which, pardon the pun, throws a whole new light on things… the achromal light triggers an entirely different response in me to the colour. It becomes more… theoretical, I suppose, but no less affecting. Not seeing it in the flesh is difficult, however – it was, I suppose the proximity to Flavin’s work that produced such extreme responses in me – being a recipient of the light itself is very different from seeing it in a book or on as a jpeg. Although, immediately, it’s the darkness between the staffs of illumination in the Culbert that I am finding almost the most affecting and almost narrative.

Bill Culbert Roslyn Oxley9

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