Colour and Light

Figuring light, Colour and The Intangible
Exhibition at Djanogly Art Gallery, Lakeside

Colour is fundamental for an artist in his or her work, it quite often sets the mood, time and ambience for an image. However this exhibition held at the Djanogly Gallery entitled Figuring light, Colour and the Intangible exhibited works concerned with exploring colour itself as an individual ingredient. Each of the four artists, Duncan Bullen, Jane Bustin, Rebecca Partridge and Richard Kenton Webb, have displayed work that investigates colour, and of course light, differently.

I was most impressed with the work of Rebecca Partridge as her vibrant paintings really caught my eye. I agree with curator Richard Davey when he describes them to echo the Kaleidoscope’s symmetrical patterns.
Partridge manages to capture the viewer in an abyss of geometrical colour that follows the principles of light as discovered by Isaac Newton. Looking at her painting Evolver my eyes are drawn through the recession created by the spiralling vortex of coloured blocks, each block has a different colour on each side no two boxes seeming to be the same colour code and both size and shape of the boxes vary creating an organised mess of form. As your eye comes out from the centre of the painting you notice that the box forms get slightly larger and the colour begins to wash creating a less intense environment when compared to the middle of the painting.

‘I’m attempting to express something fundamental expanding from a
source. It makes sense that the colour fragments from the primaries –
that it illustrates a division of light a moment of creative energy'.

Rebecca Partridge

This piece is a direct contrast to The Dazzling Darkness. In the white paintings where the colours overlap they get darker as in the subtractive colour wheel. In this painting the colours get lighter when they overlap which is the normal behaviour of light. These two paintings demonstrate the way in which colour and light interact with one another.