Welcome to my website.

This is where you can view twenty years of my paintings and acquaint yourself with the development of my work during that time.

I use a language of forms which emerge through the process of painting. The body of paintings on my site has its origins in representational works painted during my formative years, pictures which absorbed information from landscape, from still life and from Egyptian, Greek and African sculpture.

At the time I was unsure if these early works were anything more than academic exercises. But a couple of decades later, I realise that there is probably no such thing as an irrelevant period of study for an artist. Everything becomes significant. From those moments, forms and sensations were absorbed and stored in the subconscious 'vault', only to re-appear again of their own volition at precisely the point when they were most needed to create a turning point in my work. It is owing to my earlier studies of the representational world that I have never relinquished the three-dimensional, the sense of illusion in my work.

I work with the awareness that the 'integrity' - the wholeness - of the painted illusion is precarious. I disrupt it through a discordant handling of paint, with the idea of creating an active relationship between the painting and the viewer. The forms which evolve along the way are subservient to the process of orchestrating the composition and illuminating the surface.

The picture is resolved - and this may happen very suddenly - at the moment when the forms acquire their own provenance, a sense of their own history - when it appears as if they've always been there.

For me the content of a painting lies in the relationship between the motif and the evidence of the process through which it came into being - a process which will have travelled through many stages of doubt and re-invention.

During the act of painting, there is no such thing as a mistake.

Chris Christophorou
January 2008