‘With my work in abstraction, I think about it as photography, as photography freezes moments in time, so I work with time more than anything else… There is a moment in time and space when a painting stops in much the same way that a camera’s shutter closes on a moment in time. This is not a static thing.’
The interplay between the additive and subtractive process, the making and unmaking, presence and absence, constitutes the essence of the oeuvre developed by Callum Innes RSA.
Innes makes work in a number of different ways, all of which are gradually evolving. The shifts that appear from one series to the next are rarely dramatic, but each new painting builds on those that have gone before in a subtle but constant progression. His characteristic form of coolly atmospheric abstraction has aptly been described as ‘unpainting’, given that key compositional elements are generally produced, not by the application of paint, but through its removal by washes of turpentine. Each finished painting thus suggests a freezing in time of the otherwise momentary arrest of an ongoing process.
