A Bird out of Merlin’s Ear by Christopher Rainham

Christopher is interested in the way that society interacts with the wild and not so wild things around it, the effect that we have on the environment and the living things that rely on it to survive. His responses may represent an image conjured by a text or a feeling found between the lines of the story or even disparate pieces of the story, his own knowledge and other beliefs all rolled into one.

Christopher loves to work with paint, what it does, how it feels, smells, how in painting and drawing materials change and adapt, try and become something else in becoming a painting. All his work starts out with drawing, usually directly onto a primed canvas or board. He makes stencils of elements to be repeated or uses a digital projector to play with scale. Then he covers the whole surface with a range of earth colours, brown, ochre, blue or grey. At this point, Christopher starts to develop each element trying to create the colours that he wants.

Often he needs to ‘knock back’ a painting by applying a wash of colour over the existing image. He then begins to develop his picture again. This gives him the freedom to play with the depth in an image. It also brings flexibility to the edges of objects in the picture plane, light, shade and modelling.