This painting is from a series called ‘Exposed Paintings’ and was purchased following an exhibition of Callum Innes’s work at IMMA in 1999. While Innes’s work is formal, the process of making involves working methods that are subject to what he has described as “organised chance”*. Innes obviously delights in paint and in his opinion the most important thing he learnt in art school was how to mix paints in the traditional way: almost a lost art as nowadays paint is readily available and many artists use it straight from the tube.

In the ‘Exposed Paintings’ series, each painting starts off as a monochrome; then paint is removed from areas of the canvas using turpentine. A tension is created between the direction of the flow of turpentine (which runs downwards), and the direction of the brushstrokes from left to right. These sparse paintings have a quiet meditative quality which slows down the viewer’s response and demands a closer, more contemplative look.

*Callum Innes in conversation with Sarah Glennie, the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, 1999.