Mike England - ABOUT MY WORK

"Creativity is an on-going, changing, evolving entity, and the creative process should also be similar to this".

Art and Scienc

The force of Science lies in its authoritative reason. The force of art lies in its immediate influence on human psychology and its active contagiousness. Being a creation of Man it re-creates man.
Art has no need of philosophical arguments, it does not follow the signposts of philosophical systems. Art, like life, dictates systems of philosophy. It is not concerned with the meditation about what is and how it came to be, That is a task for knowledge. Knowledge is born of the desire to know, Art derives from the necessity to communicate and to announce.
The stimulus of science is the deficiency of our knowledge. The stimulus of Art is the abundance of our emotions and our latent desires. Science is the vehicle of facts - it is indifferent, or at best tolerant to the ideas which lie behind facts. Art is the vehicle of ideas and its attitude to facts is strictly partial.
Science looks and observes, Art sees and foresees.

About Mike's Painting (Interview, October 2000)

Mike England's work reflects his belief that the more you learn the less you know. "I'm into paint", he says simply. "Painting on canvas. It's as old as the hills". Indeed, there is nothing clever about the paintings, no point of reference on which the viewer may hang concepts, and thereby feel intelligent. In place of cleverness, there is rigour and humility in the face of this ancient medium.
Mike is a filter for his environment. He works in a small studio in East London. Through his window he tracks the changing light of a big sky, he absorbs the hub and motion of urban life.
The canvasses are each a map of Mike's quest for visual harmony. They reflect the harmony in the object world; the balance and tension between colour, texture and line; between order and chaos, flux and stasis. Vertical stripes may recall the migrating bands of TV sets, those alternative windows through which we view the world. They may also remind us the inherent delay of perception, of the relationship between time and distance.
Mike's work is non-referential. It aspires to pure feeling. If we can look at the paintings as we apprehend music or gaze at the sea, or watch an electric storm, they we become accessible to them.
The floating blocks of colour, the soft yellows and blues and the vibrant reds, the successive layers of paint, create an ethereal quality, a sense of shifting motion. Mike wishes to blur the boundaries of perception. The eye floats across the canvas. It will not find a recognizable image, a focal point generating meaning. This is the vocation of advertising and Mike's work is the opposite of advertising. If advertising images are signs attached to meaning then Mike's paintings cut images off from meaning so that they may float away like balloons, freeing the mind.
Lucy Wadham. (Writer)

An observation; Cities, "the stuff that surrounds us". Taken from notes written while in Tokyo, April 2002

Tokyo

Its architecture, ordered clean lines, formal buildings that cut into the skyline.

Blocks of form, squares, rectangles, steel, concrete. The endless variants of tone and colour combinations of buildings, posters and lights, that either bombards or subtly fills our view.

Sitting on a train I watch this city unfold and pass by, a continuous feast of colour and form. Visual poetry.

I don't speak or read the language here, so the words, signs and advertisements take on a different meaning and have no influence on what I see. In themselves they become shapes and marks on a canvas. I find there is a beauty to this feast of visual harmony and chaos.

Mike England

About Mike Englands Paintings

I am drawn to the paint; swathes of colour determined by the dynamics of the surface.

Structures and spaces sit somewhere between the second and third dimension, painterly episodes hang on the bones of composition.

There is a sense of scale to these canvases, Even the small ones seem large, the large ones closer.

Although London (and even more specifically the square mile) is the backdrop for Michael's activity in and around his studio, I don't see any reference to a specific location.

The painter is not so much representing a city as building his own painterly form replacing bricks and steel, poetry compensating for the dull glow of urban myth, his vision generating the power that changes these surfaces. Urban form is simply a platform from which the painter can dive into his unique journey, through creativity and expression.

The paintings are about the nature of balance, rhythm and harmony, a visual event from one edge to the other; each mark a testament to the activities that overlap and intertwine on the surface and underneath it, within a painting and within an urban environment, as the viewer watches with interest.

Jon Lane (Artist)

Mike England's recent paintings oscillate between harmonic fusion and conflict, between spacial illusion and surface treatment, between subject and object.

Their composition is as elementary as the subject constructed on axes of both vertical and horizontal symmetry, expressed by a seductive, rock bottom vocabulary of irregular widths and intervals.

His confident use of excessive saturated brilliance of colour warming the stark uninhabited urban landscape.

Awesomely simple yet awesomely complex, perpetuating the Northern Romantic landscape painting tradition of the artist responding directly to his environment and

Interpreting it into paint on canvas.

Michael though is not a "plein air" painter; his practice is that of a studio painter.

Only his subliminal scanning of his inner cities surroundings, his notations whilst wandering the streets, his reference.

Anyone who considers them selves to be a city dweller will be at home and comfortable with Michael's structural language and its metropolitan influences.

Mike Ozouf (Artist, art critic)

Talking about the Circle paintings.

The circle paintings started while i was in Cyprus.

I was reading an article about pollen in an old copy of national geographic. while looking at the B&W images of these microscopic particles a thought hit me, this very basic yet fundamental shape; the circle, Is universally repeated through out nature and the universe. From micro to macro, pollen to planets. Whether it's recognized as a disc, a hole, an orb or ripples on a pond, they are all connected by this shape.

The first set of paintings I made were specifically about the circle. 4 paintings, the same size circle placed on the same size canvases, yet all painted differently. The idea was that they were the same but yet so different in character. The painted circle could end up being a plate, hole or a three dimensional sphere.

The Hammersmith circle series paintings,(10 canvases the same size) was a natural progression. In these paintings the circles are the same size, and the radius was based upon the length of my arm. These canvases were rectangle unlike the squarish ones of the Cyprus paintings, there is more space around the circle which creates a relationship between the circle and its surrounding space. By adding another element to this surrounding space(a vertical line) this created a new dynamic and tension which I wanted and found exciting. by taking things back to such basics through the use of this beautiful shape I felt as though i was relearning visual language and began to truly understand the language of abstraction.

New Paintings (interview, shoreditch 2000)

In two earlier series of paintings, Ten Circles (1998) and the Indian Series (1999), Mike England eliminated all figuration from his work: the Ten Circles series comprised of ten canvases, all the same size and all featuring a circle dictated by the radius of his arm; the Indian series used deep, saturated colours, punctuated by light, bright, sudden vertical lines, and was deeply influenced by the experience of India.
His latest series of paintings continues to explore colour, line and shape, but here more than ever there is a sense of tension between the elements involved and a play between flat canvas and illusional space, progression and recession.
Aspects of the earlier series remain - circles appears in all but one of the canvases. But they are now laid down in strident colours - primary yellows, reds and blues, glossy black and touches of purple - that suggest Mike's new urban surroundings.
The scratchy vertical lines which formerly suggested the life and vibrancy of India, become more nervy and anxious in this context. The colours are so bright that they play on the eye, advancing and retreating so that space is skewed and subverted.
Mike often adopts the device of cutting through a form with a stripe of colour, itself over painted with a similar colour, making the stripe jump forwards and backwards, in and out of the picture plane. This used to optimum effect in the image where a blue stripe cuts through a brilliant, startling red, disorienting the viewer.
Elements are overlapped within the images, creating the suggestion of space behind the picture surface.
In some of the images, shapes pile up and jostle for space, with a collage-like effect. The circles formerly floating ethereally in space and hemmed in by more rectilinear forms suggesting buildings and cityscapes. There is also much use of bright colour dots, applied to the canvas in random groups as a balance to other, larger, elements and then over painted around the edges, suggesting something quickly moving that is briefly glimpsed and then vanishes.
Countering the effect of space and recession, some areas of canvas surface are heavily worked with brush strokes or sometimes words and statements, heavily over painted so that they are illegible as words but visible as calligraphy. The trappings of modern life, which worked in contrast to the more meditative mood of the earlier series, now fit in with the choppy, blocky imagery and appear more frequently - a shape that looks like a light switch appears in many of the pictures, while other images suggest television screens.
Throughout the images the tense balancing of the forms, the strident colour, the jostling overlapping shapes and dislocation of space create something very much darker in mood and more edgy that the earlier series, capturing the energy, tensions and sense of transition in city life.

Philippa Baker. (writer, jounalist)

press release Piero Passat Gallery, 21 Fleet Street, London EC4.

“Grace, Form, Beauty and Balance”

An exhibition of paintings by Mike England. Thurs’ 27th May 2010

There are 2 periods of work on show.

“Within the city” series, and “Recent Paintings”

“City paintings”, Showing 10 paintings from a series of 30 that I painted over a period of 2 years (2002-2004) while living and working in my studio in Shoreditch (1999-2005).

These paintings were loosely based on sketches I made while wandering around the City(financial district) at weekends and evenings when it was empty of people (comparatively so)

What I found Fascinating as I walked through this area were the exaggerated perspectives and vanishing points that buildings made. How these huge block shapes, made of glass, steel and concrete seemed to change, and how the same view altered when it was night. Buildings lit from the in-side, reflections from traffic lights, headlights of passing cars effected this environment, visually changing its appearance completely.

I became interested in the visual composition of this environment. I wanted to strip it back to its simplest form. And through the working of 30 paintings I tried to achieve this idea. I worked with compositions of block forms, suggested perspectives and random suggested reflections and lighting.

some were in my Opinion more successful than others. Overall I think this series of work was relatively successful though, both in achieving its objective and also out of the 30 made, 20 were collected by individuals as well as collectors.

The New work is a continuous, unfolding, evolving process of painting based on my experience, fascination, curiosity and interest in the visual language of painting, especially abstract painting.

Literal paintings tell stories regardless how loosely or tightly the recognizable imagery might be. It allows the viewer to process the recognized imagery through the eyes to the mind, and then to understand this language of painting.

Abstract painting is pure visual language. Again the viewer absorbs the painting through the eyes, but this time allows the viewer to experience the painting, not just to recognize it. For many, it is difficult for the mind to processes this visual information and therefore unable to understand this language. As there is nothing recognizable to hang pre-conceived conceptions on.

I often think there are similarities with abstract painting and Jazz. Both are free and indefinable, both adhere to a set of liberal rules (in that you have to learn the fundamentals of painting as you do with music. You have to learn the rulebook then throw it away.) and both have the power to make people feel and to move them emotionally, hopefully with a sense of Grace, Form, Beauty and Balance.

Mike England, May 2010.