EMPTY GESTURES
The 'Empty Gestures' series is a group of 10 small acrylic on cardboard works. The pieces function as a comment on the widely held belief that an artist's intent and emotional state can be 'read' from the brushstrokes, as a sort of psychological language in paint form. In some cases this may of course be true, but it is equally likely that the intense emotion of the brushstrokes and paint handling is a purely aesthetic choice. The meanings we see behind the act of moving paint on a surface are entirely arbitrary, in much the same way that language generates meaning in a way both arbitrary and by communal consensus. Each piece was built up into a kind of visual 'vocabulary', an alphabet of sorts, and then assigned names/emotions at random from the Plutchik Wheel of Emotions.