Alan Shipway

For me, the practice of painting is the asking of visual questions. And it seems to me the questions that need to be asked through art are: What irreducibly constitutes good art? What is the ultimate source of value or quality in art? What is necessary to art, and what can it not do without? It is impossible to get to the essence of your own work without asking these questions.

I find I'm interested in painting that seems to expose the mechanisms of painting itself, where everything superfluous has been stripped away, where at the same time there is nothing lacking, so that what's left is the aesthetic essential. To me, there is always something exhilarating about arriving at this essence, or to see it in other art.

Alan Shipway