4. Rotating flower patterns

There was a quietly nagging issue that had been bothering me for years. While patterns certainly have enhancing qualities, they can also be—like wallpaper—boring.

How could my work, considering my interest in studying patterns, avoid the “boring” category? By mid-2023, engaging audiences seemed like an incredibly complex challenge. The real question though, was: how to avoid repetitive patterns and create ones that ultimately contribute to audience engagement?

In a world saturated with images, some perhaps skilfully crafted, others manufactured, and many now generated digitally, is the role of the conventional artist not under threat? My personal feeling was that if artists sought to sustain some sort of quasi relevance within art communities and societies at large, it was a no-brainer that they had to contribute in a meaningful way.

Are conventional artists now so sidelined that they are unable to participate in various areas such as the science of engaging consumers to buy products, or able to understand the basics of how photons work? What about the role of visual perception in psychology, sociology? What is our role in society?

In such an environment, how could I possibly conceive of producing anything worth the cost of the Arches watercolour paper it was painted on? This was the real issue.

Perhaps the artistic rationalisation was that I could explore, in my own way, methods for using readily available resources to create engaging imagery. I could utilise readily available.materials, my design/compositional skills, and my painterly skills. The task would be a little like mastering a musical instrument – exploit the mix of continuous learning, persistent practice, and a willingness to understand the innate qualities of my inner self, and just keep going.

My beliefs were (and still are) that art should be beautiful, hold meaningful inferences to the world in which it was created, and most importantly, it should elicit an emotional response (engagement).

So, for me, focusing on exploring complex, not-so-easily recognisable, compositional patterns was one obvious method, a starting point, for achieving this.