Colourfields is a series of photographic artworks which create expanses of colour, light and dark: usurping the conventional photographic notions of foreground and background such that there is only surface. Or simply put ‘abstract photography’.
Photography has conventions which guide our notions of what is a ‘good photograph’ or ‘good photography’. We simply come to know how a photograph should be because that is how it has always been.
An item in the foreground is shown in its details. Items in the background are shown out of focus, softened and blurred. But sticking to these notions doesn’t allow us to fully explore the surface in the way that a painter might for example. Convention destroys invention. Or more rightly, invention destroys convention!
There is an very elemental decision made prior to creating a photograph: are there figurative elements. Can we understand it or read it? If there are few or no figurative elements then what’s the point of an ‘abstract photograph’? That makes no sense! Argh … but since when has the feeling and sensation of something required knowing?
Somehow, we have removed the human element of creating photographic art. There, I said it – not photograph but photographic art. Less a person tending a machine and more artist with a tool box, I suggest. So in this series of photographic artworks, I play with these notions – not to the extent that I simply invert the usual order of things but such that I allow other feeling and sensations to swim in the motif and design. A liquid surface has its own currents and order. To be orderless is not simply a different order but one with its own sense of pleasure and fortune.
Colourfield Galleries
See Colourfields Gallery 1 | Colourfields Gallery 2 | Colourfields Gallery 3
Tintype
The colourfields series are light falling on a photographic film: analogue photography. We could use the film in an enlarger or indeed make a contact print to transfer it onto a paper or board for presentation. But in this case, the film was scanned and rendered into a digital file.
Tintypes are an early form of photography: ‘a photograph made by creating a direct positive on a thin sheet of metal, colloquially called ‘tin’, coated with a dark lacquer or enamel and used as the support for the photographic emulsion’ [Wikipedia entry, 2 December 2025].
I commissioned the printing of a colourfields image onto Aluminium Composite Material or ACM. Dibond is a trademark for it. See image above. The ink sits on the aluminium surface which may also have a white ground prior to coloured inks being applied: much like a canvas for a painting might have a white ground applied to it before the artist applies paint to it.
But the aluminium surface is also available without a white base where the metal is brushed prior to the coloured inks being applied. The effect is that the metal becomes coloured so yellow applied to the surface looks golden rather than the yellow which we might see if it were applied to a white surface on the aluminium. Perhaps now, the imagine is even more about surface as it fused to the aluminium metal rather than sitting on a white surface.
In some ways, this form of printing on an aluminium metal substraight is very reminiscent of tintypes with their metal base even though a digital process renders onto the surface rather than a analogue photo-sensitive process.
But perhaps that’s the important difference here: it is the swirl of photographic emulsion on the surface which makes for the character of tintype. It is a process and not simply a deposit on a metal surface which we have with printing on ACM!
If you would like to commission a print of the colourfields series then please contact Andrew