Paintings
Christopher McEwen's paintings play between the figurative and abstract with influences drawn from characters, people places, and scences. Various techniques in application and materials are used in the paintings with complex and guiding compositions. Some depict a representation or personal visualisation whilst other paintings are influenced by discovered items. Some paintings are of places that have been visited, distorted into a hint of memory, whilst others have developed from an unsuspecting gift from a friend.
Watercolours are more traditional and figurative by nature. They draw their influences from places and memories, a snapshot of a moment. The watercolours are of friends and strangers caught in a moment. Windows and doorways, set structures with abstract elements.
paintings
Poet and scholar 1900-1985. His own obituary...Minor poet, not conspicuously dishonest...
garden landscapes
Trellis and growth...
watercolours
A morning on Lantau Island off Hong Kong...
illustrations
Dionysius, the Greek tyrant, had a tube inserted from his palace to the prison to eavesdrop. Catherine De Medici had a similar system in the Louvre.
Paintings
The Illustrations come from fairy tales and sayings, some well know and others obscure. Christopher McEwen's drawings combine sensitivity and lightness with heavy tones and a freedom of marks. The application of the illustrations lends itself well to the subject as the children's tales and sayings are playful, often with a sinister undertone.
The Garden Landscapes are abstractions of a contained landscape. The paintings draw out exaggerated shapes from the landscape from fencing and borders to the natural shapes of plants, trees and ripples on water. Even the most figurative of paintings draw out abstraction in the landscape.
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