A great friend of mine once took me under his wing after we met for, what was meant to be a 30 minute and actually turned out to be a two hour, tutorial in my final year at art school. Topics discussed included: 2001 A Space Odyssey, abstraction and birds of prey. Following a long-winded and clumsy initial email from me and a one-liner from him: 'why don't you come and spend a day in my studio,' we went on to spend the best part of 18 months in his studio listening to old advertising jingles, organising endless collage material and throwing paint around until it completely covered every pair of Converse I owned.
I have come to admire the work of this artist very much, and the impact it has had on my own creative thought-process has been irreversible. He is the painter Danny Rolph, who's work on twinwall, canvas and paper is internationally renowned. He uses a refreshingly organic and spontaneuos approach to painting, incorporating elements of collage, oils, acrylic, to family photographs and momentos from past travels. These are somehow brought together with remarkable coherence via sharp, interjecting lines and odd shapes and forms only he can create and thus explain.
Recently the work has come to represent the otherworldly forces that cause effects such as movement and transition: 'My recent paintings possess more of a dissonant quality accentuated through marks that have a clearer association with forces such as motion, velocity and acceleration and are at odds with the quasi-architectonic structures that they circumnavigate, disassembling and reconstructing them on the same plane.'
Danny Rolph is represented by Poppy Sebire in London and has just returned from a successful solo exhibition at Volta in New York.
See his work here:
http://www.dannyrolph.com/
http://ny.voltashow.com/Danny-Rolph.5907.0.html
Art xx
