Flowers West Santa Monica: solo show.

This solo exhibition provided the first opportunity to exhibit Blacklock’s ongoing investigation into the possibility of narrative in abstract painting. The relationship of the viewer to the painting - as if standing in front of a void or other such metaphysical phenomena, played out through abstract expressionism, is necessarily challenged in this series of paintings. They explore the possibilities of a narrative action, where one form could be seen to ‘act’ on another resulting in a responding action by the second form.

Testing this hypothesis through the adoption of the fundamental narrative form in ‘Annunciations’, Blacklock became interested in the pictorial conventions of this narrative; the relationship between the two forms equated to the complexity of a relationship between two people.

In this attempt to ‘open up’ abstract painting from the ‘painting as an object’ or painting as carrier of subjective angst to allow for a more playful and varied kind of space and structure to be developed, and the generation of a pictorial space that alludes to, but is not depictive of, recessive space. The shapes in these paintings related to each other and existed in the same space. ‘Urban Narrative A4’ acknowledged the pictorial space of annunciations that depict Mary in a closed or bounded space that the angel appears next to, by the simple means of a glaze pulled over the secondary shape in this painting that shifts the space in this area of the painting without excluding the two shapes from their narrative.

The exhibiton also included ‘Dialogue 2’ (2002), ‘Dialogue 3’ (2002), ‘Moondog’ (2002), ‘Moondog II’ (2002), ‘One for Bill’ (2002), ‘Urban Myth’ (2002), ‘Urban Narrative – LA Bloom’ (2002), ‘Urban Narrative A2’ (2002) ‘ ‘Urban Narrative – Echo’ (2001) and ‘Annunciation 4’ (2002).

George Blacklock's research is centred on the progressive development of abstract painting - "what this fictional space can and cannot do". This interest in pictorial / fictional space has led to an enquiry into the possibility of narrative in abstract painting.

'A painting is quite a complex object,' says Blacklock, 'complex in its making, complex in its reading'. In the studio he finds a similar complexity of thought: 'a collision of ideas, images and instinctive speculation.' He believes that painting is a continuum of activity and that paintings betray, rather than demonstrate, intentions. To him, this suggests a more complex relationship to intention than might be expected, and that 'an intention arises from a whole web of ideas, rather than in linear fashion. The most pertinent quality to have in the studio is that of watchfulness.'

He works in a sequential or open series of paintings, in each, a shape or form is revisited/restated within different 'contexts'. The use of variable pictorial space tied to a specific formal 'narrative' stems directly from his interest in religious paintings and sculptures on such themes as 'Annunciations' and 'Pietas'.

His current work re- interprets such 'given' narratives to allow other or 'extra' narratives to occur.