(NEDERLANDSE VERSIE: www.anthonypaul.nl)
My aim in painting is to respond to the endless variety and fascination of the world and to make images that communicate my own sensory and emotional experience. People are sometimes surprised that my pictures range from fairly realistic to abstract. This seems to me the natural way to proceed as there is no clear dividing line between abstract and figurative. In any case, whether 'abstract' or figurative all my work embodies my personal response to the world and existence.
I want my paintings to be alive and to stay alive on the wall, with everything in the picture vibrating together and interacting: colours, light and dark, the rhythm of the marks on the canvas. I want textures that resonate and open up mysterious spaces so that the picture becomes fuller and more intricate the closer and longer you look at it. I very much like the medium of paint, particularly oil paint. Paint is infinitely rich and subtle and is itself part of the material substance of the world.
Much contemporary art assumes that it is the business of art to reflect our disembodied modern lives and focus on the realities and burning issues of our time, not Nature, which is out of fashion, thought to be irrelevant to modern life. But Nature is a permanent fact and a part of ourselves as we are part of it, and it is good for us to recognize this. It is precisely because our lives are denaturalized that we need to re-establish contact with the natural and physical world. This is in fact the most urgent issue of our time, and one of the most valuable things art can do is to bring into balance our rational, analytic side and our primal core.
For John Constable “painting is another word for feeling”, Cézanne said he wanted to achieve "a harmony parallel to nature", and Baudelaire described the modern art of 1846 as being about "intimacy, spirituality, colour, aspiration towards the infinite". These are timeless statements of what serious art is about, and I feel at home with them.