"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
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.
I am drawn to the paint; swathes of colour determined by the dynamics of the surface.
Jon Lane (Artist)
Mike England's recent paintings oscillate between harmonic fusion and conflict, between spacial illusion and surface treatment, between subject and object.
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. 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)