Traditionally artists paint from source materials, from plans, sketches, photographs, or from the object itself. Think of Cézanne sitting before Mont St Victoire. Even abstract painters - many approach their art this way.

I have never been very much interested in painting from source materials. I like to interact directly and exclusively with the canvas, to see what can be found in the ‘object-free’ zone between the artist and the canvas.

This is a space where art interacts as much with the mind, as with the eye. Surprising things can be found here, things that can communicate powerfully and things that can tell us a lot about what art is and how we appreciate it.

It is an approach to painting, where our innate aesthetic sensibilities combine with the immense, subterranean resources of our absorbed experience to shape things and the end result always remains an open question. One must have faith in one’s ability to develop an, at times, terrible jumble of gestures into a coherent expression.

My explorations are documented through an evolving cycle from figures, to landscapes, to abstraction. One of my beliefs is that all these genres – indeed all genres of art – follow a common underlying pattern. The principles that govern whether an abstract painting succeeds or fails are the same as those that govern whether landscape or figurative paintings succeed or fail.

This pattern is perhaps most clearly discernable in abstraction because here it presents itself in its purest form. When distracted by the common objects of our everyday experience, such as figures and landscapes, we fail to notice what it really is that makes a painting appeal, or not appeal, and what drives its impact.

This is not to say that all genres of painting are the same, but they are more deeply connected than we often realise. It is my interest in these sorts of things that has led me to embrace, over time, a diversity of genres, to explore their similarities and differences.



James Yuncken




To see the painting process in action as a painting is created click here