Eye on Art Series : The Painter’s Perspective

October 22, 2020

The Eye on Art Series is a collection of interviews from the lens of four international artists and gallery owners to give us a deeper insight to their perspectives on art and the origins of their inspiration.

From ancient art treasures to contemporary art, the underlying philosophies and interpretations immerses us into a storied dialogue where we can harness the timeless wisdom and sensibility to generate a new context of ideas of the world in which we live in.

RUPERT RECORD – PAINTER

How long have you been painting and selling your art?

I’ve been painting since I was a child but started to take it more seriously when I went to Art college at 20. Drawing as investigation, it was a priority at Chelsea College of Art. I was exploring my inner identity as I drew a coastline, a tree, grass or a stream.

The drawings went through many different processes and experiments. Firstly, with landscape and moving on to interiors and inside/outside spaces.

I became more interested in feelings involved with contemplation and started to practice meditation which guided me to change both the drawings and the paintings.

What is your definition of great art?

Freedom, individuality and spontaneity.

The starting points for the start of my Spartacus series of paintings include Aram Khachaturian’s ballet ‘Spartacus’ and the 1980 Stanley Kubrik epic of the same name. However, I was originally drawn to the film by the memory of watching it when I was twelve years old.

I attempted to recreate a world bending the greed, hate and violence into auras of luminous colour, reminiscent of stained glass, to reflect the deeper emotion and uniqueness within each figure as shown in my ‘Caesar’ portrait.

The layers within each historical character transform and the individual’s internal pain to investigate “the triumph of the spirit over oppression” and visually shown within colours and textures.

What experience or meaning do you want to convey in your art?

In the Spartacus series, I investigated both aura photography and sensing aura colours within our own magnetic field. Barbara Brennon and Leadbeater.

Led originally through my meditation practice and reading on Kandinsky ‘The Spiritual in Art’, I participated in new age sensing auras workshops to be able to compare aura photography and the colours from sensing auras. I examined both the aura studies of Barbara Brennon and the aura illustrations by Charles Leadbetter.

It opened doors towards the transformation of shapes and a new way of seeing and viewing colour. The completed paintings suggest how someones energy manifests into colours, patterns, and shapes which I have reworked into the features of the face.

Any main inspirations?

I have been very interested in Susan Hiller within her aura portraits series. She uses both her childhood imagination alongside research into the coloured emanations around people captured with a high tech bio feedback imaging camera that takes a photo of your dynamic magnetic field.

Where can we find your artwork?

www.rupertrecord.co.uk