Melvyn Poore
Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein
Melvyn Poore is a visual artist and musician living in Lübeck.
Message
Melvyn Poore began painting whilst also working as a musician. As a student, he analysed works by contemporary visual artists, making comparisons to concepts in the music of contemporary composers. Experience of programming music software led to creating digital images. A seminal experience was a performance of John Cage's HPSCHD in 1983 in Denton, Texas.
Bringing together the musical and visual has been a theme throughout his career, working in theatre, opera, fashion, dance, film, video and his own paintings.
The analog works seen here are the result of spontaneous, improvisatory activity, an explosive impulse which belongs to only one moment in time; nevertheless they play a role in a psychological process, which finds its closure in these pictures.
The digital works are the result of investigations into the role of chance and indeterminacy in everyday life: many elements of the pictures are produced using random procedures.
Statement
I work in the analog and digital domains, making pictures which feed from the experience of both areas. Underlying much of my present work is an exploration of layering which - in analogue painting - is a centuries-old technique. In the digital domain, it is 'second-nature' and much more free, since it fits the structure of the medium so well and one can build in interactions between the layers.
In order to bring about surprises and challenges in my digital work I use the wide field of random functions. When something non-intentional occurs, it is subsumed into the work. It requires a change of direction, responding to new input. This is an important part of my working process - and my everday life!
So - often - I do not know how a work will turn out, but sometimes I do envisage a picture - or part of it - in advance. I hone my learning process by setting myself specific problems, which inevitably turn into a series of solutions. Take a theme and subject it to many variations. I have a number of ongoing series which are in different collections in my gallery (https://www.artworkarchive.com/profile/mp-art).
Whilst setting myself technical exercises, I discovered a fascination with the physical materials and the processes that I use to make marks on a surface. There are so many factors involved: color, viscosity, transparency, fluidity of the paint; length, thickness, profile, flexibility and speed of the brush; size and qualities of the painting surface; the source and range of light; the position of my body in relation to the surface. All of these have been investigated by many artists, long ago, but the materials keep changing as our technology changes; there are always new things to find out and unrealised pictures to discover. There are always old habits to identify, whose absence would make my way free again. This is all part of my inward journeying, to explore relationships between all those factors mentioned above - and more! I experience these areas expanding all the time - which is, of course, only another way to say that I am developing the ability to see and use them. This is a Reason To Do Art!