“The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this

primary figure is repeated without end.”

Emerson.

The artist's in this show initially got on board the notion of the relation of form and colour as a kind
of boat, specifically, and matter of factly, the idea of a two hulled catamaran type of vessel. Before
crossing the gangplank one of these painters stated: 'I see form through colour and colour as form.'

While we are on the one hand analogically talking of a single two-pronged dynamic, we are on the
other matter of factly describing a kind of driving bolted together design in which differences are
unified into a form of thrust. I would suggest that the two different imaginary hulls fixed together in
this case are that of force and that of form. Colour is a force, or collection of forces, of its own and
form is a kind of overal unifying matrix – so that I interpret these artists shared aspiration as a sense
of a force of painting, of colour, at one with the whole form of the momentum that it propels. It's
colour that fills the sails, but that is also the resistant sea that their bright colourful dreamboat slices
through. Form is the unity of the whole thing, the entire horizon as well as the boat itself, but, and
here's the rub, it is the thing that the force of our little catamaran continually takes us beyond.

'Form is purely defined by the colour it holds, without colour there wouldn’t be any form.'

Colour is the wind but also the engineered forces that hold such a solitary raft together, a creative
vessel designed to approach the speed of light as it tracks across unknown oceans. One of our
painters notes that in the colourful achievement of the form that is raced through and on whose deck
he stands there is only 'an association of coordinate points more or less well coordinated', maybe
he is speaking of the stars by which we are vainly supposed to navigate.

Another of the crew says: 'I think of form as any element in a painting - as soon as a mark is on a
surface some sort of form has been created, be that shape, space or line.'. In this case it is all just
part of the boat, a discreet element working with other forms, something to be filled with forces in
order to propel the boat and to keep it from sinking, all the shapes, spaces and lines become filled as
if by wind, colour itself fills the canvas and off we go into, through, across, the strange manifold
worlds of form, held on and boyant within its ever moving horizon line.
'Through the varying of opacities and the application of veils of white gesso the forms engage in a
play of presence and absence, substance and shadow.'
There are storms at sea. The little double-ship's sails are moulded within horizons bombarded by
contradictory forces, social, political, physical, etc. Chance gusts impact from within and without.
The bolts holding it all together strain and sheer. Forces of persuasion at all costs aggress us from
brilliant handleld screens everywhere as we risk life and limb on deck and rolling pavements. We
gasp agape as internal impulses and others emotions snarl up and entangle. When we do venture out
into wind swept decks we roll through undersea entertainment complexes clutching the guardrail.
Our tears are jerked, our laughters burst out, we are constantly, indeed compusively, trolled by
abusive forces out of our control and that can blow in from anywhere.

This is, as one of our artist carefully notes in the ships log, an experience of - 'form as animate
matter.' Artists, amongst other professionals, do their best to navigate such affect buffeted realities,
creating new forces of their own to protect and serve us, to challenge and resist the drives that can
chaotically define us, pulling on ropes here and there, surfing the waves at speed, pulling in and out
of various ports. The way art's rhythms both well up from the past and carry us into the future can
offer some kind of other-worldly resistance or counterforce, some kind of strength. Artists, often
against their own nature, are able to create a controlling formal power that's apparent throughout
history, one that can feel lost and found to us, without having to insist on its universality, and of
course art is also radically open to everything beyond the swell of its own horizon. Art is a form of
vulnerabilty, it can surely feel like being lost at sea.

'I understand form as a structure which brings a renewing implicitness of meaning and emotion into
existence'

Maybe it was the French dramatist and poet Antonin Artaud who did most to articulate the impact
of forces on form; in his essay The Plague he wrote of the horror of disease visited on a port after
the arrival of a boat from over the horizon. He carefully, if pungently, describes how deadly new
forces destroy the city from within and without. Since his devastating insights artists have been
trying to play catch up and it can often feel that vocabulary itself has been scoured away, caught and
double bound by impersonal and deadly forces whether those of universal war or less intensely, but
still relatively catastrophically, those of the art market and fashion in which galleries themselves can
feel like war zones. Forces that don't just invade us but actually well up from within as if we think
them up ourselves. In the boats log this is written out longhand: 'Form in art engages with our
unconscious as much as our consciousness'.
The unfashionable, unlikely, mutable nature of form is part, in fact, of its resistant nature. Artists,
those irreductibly amateur professionals, work to make form part of life. A part that can at times
create a sense of containing life itself, a unity of the life that we inhabit and the one that inhabits us,
like a memory.

We set sail 'in simple tweaked and dented shapes that play with the border between abstraction and
representation.'

In the wake of these lines this belatedly urgent gathering of painters indicates the seizing of an
opportunity to create and display some form of thoughtful and inclusive resistance. A kind of
resistant unity embodied in a force at the heart of painting itself – the force of colour – a power that
some amongst them characterise, and indeed create, as the power of form itself. A catamaran is an
ancient design, repurposed and refined to race across the Atlantic, or any other lonely ocean. Each
painter aboard strives to create something memorable, a resistant form that feels as if it arrives from
within.