PHILL FINLEY

INK PAINTING

STUDIES IN BLACK AND WHITE

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My work is about trying to capture emotion,

positive emotion,

the good place in the mind.

To do that I choose to paint with ink, to use black and white which most purely conveys and accents emotion. Color tends to want to be about itself.

Black and white focuses on, and thus allows you to focus on:

the subject

composition

quality of work

and allows light to appear in its purest form.

I’ve also chosen to paint with ink because of the challenge, it is considered to be a most difficult medium to work with. Subsequently, the great advantage is that it allows me to spend an extended period of time with each painting, which in turn allows a wide range of my own emotions to become an integrated part of each painting.

There are times when we see something that intrigues us, but then we seem to simply move on to something else. I find it interesting to figure out what I feel is of particular interest about that scene and try to capture the feeling in a painting. Sometimes it involves a reductive design as with the church in "Shadows of Thought", or is given the attention to detail as in "Yardflower",.

I have to see something special and want to celebrate it, there has to be a sense of wanting to become part of the scene, that I am intriqued enough to want to begin to have a sense of what it would be like to have actually created it. This feeling takes time to develop, so I try to take the time to look at the drawing in progress and let it influence what I will do with it next. The painting develops a life of its own and in a way becomes a friend. As I've learned from my students, I try to help it become the best that it can be and then let it go to stand on its own. Again, as with my students, to have a painting reach my perception of its potential becomes an addictive passion.

The paintings are done with brush and ink on white pebbleboard. As previously mentioned, the challenge of working with ink in this way is what first interested me, and I've come to see a seemingly endless variety of artistic avenues to explore, such as; how to best focus on and celebrate the subject, integrating white space within the subject with subsequent juxtaposition of spatial relationships, brush control, and transparency, to think of a few.

Note: all images and this site are copyrighted.