Barry De More - Solo Exhibition

For The Love of Paint

For a painter, two fundamental issues need to be addressed – what to paint and how to paint it. For me, the first is the easiest to resolve. As an expressionist painter the subject matter is not difficult to find. My main inspiration comes from the local area where I live – Calderdale. The difficulty lies in how to paint it because I don’t want to simply paint a copy of the subject.

If I set out to paint a bowl of fruit, I don’t want to just paint a bowl of fruit. In other words, I don’t necessarily paint what I see but paint what I feel. I want to paint it in a different way so that it’s not just a bowl of fruit, it’s a new experience. That is, it’s an emotional experience in me – does the painting ‘feel’ right, does it look right, is it tonally correct, what changes do I need to make so that the subject works in the end? A finished painting for me will always be locked together by the brush work, shapes, tones, movement and overall energy.

While painting Delph Library I tried to keep away from detail; the sky, people and buildings are just suggestions, they aren’t real representatives of what was there. It depicts my reality of the scene, my interpretation. I particularly like the strokes in this painting, they don’t follow form but they work together.

I’d like to point out that the lighter blue strokes on top of the bridge in Railway Bridge, Old Road, Halifax represents a train and not the sky!

The painting titled Landscape is a scene from Greetland, an area near to where I live. It was especially difficult knowing how to paint the trees in this one. Painting trees in a representational way is easy enough for someone with drawing ability, but how do you paint a tree in a new way? The strokes on the 3 foreground trees needed to be different than the middle distance trees to create variation.

Elland Bridge is a particular favourite of mine because of the tonality and energy which comes through.

The 2 Alzin paintings depict a Foundry in Elland, West Yorkshire, which provides a diverse range of aluminium (Al) and zinc (zin) castings. The tones used in Alzin Old Building unconsciously mimic the nature of the Foundry – full of grime and muck.

When it comes to making a painting, I have to say I don’t plan what they should look like and I never know how the paint is going to work until I get it down; I’m constantly making changes until I’m happy with the finished piece. In essence, I can’t say I’ve painted any of these images because the light happened to shine at a particularly glorious angle which I felt compelled to capture. I can’t say I was moved to create a series of tonally similar paintings because of the mood I was in that day. I’m afraid all I can say is that the motive behind these paintings is simply for the love of paint!