William Dick

My paintings, drawings and prints record my interest in reconciling different and often estranged qualities and ideas in all media. I work through an experimental evaluation of the co-influence or confluence of organic and geometric, texture and structure, density and transparency, the sensuous history of the media and the austere tradition of minimalism.

Within the context of abstraction, namely geometric and organic, I begin with the fundamental balance between line and colour. I have drawn on ancient symbolic shapes from my Scottish background and I am influenced by the symbolic power of simplest forms of drawn lines such as the circles, concentric circles and spirals of Pictish and Celtic Art. Linear elements in my work derive from this source as well as from African and Aboriginal Art, Abyssinian Warrior Shields and Russian icons, and other lines and shapes that retain, in the broadest sense, some significance within culture.

For colour I begin from observation of geological form and the substance of land; of dust, sand, mud and rock as well as the outcrop of local street furniture/ architecture; weather and the effects of weathering, and then of the often extreme and exotic colour of lichen, peat and mosses.