Abstraction, colour, texture, balance
In many ways Chris Sims is a traditional artist. His work is about juxtapositions — light and dark, progression and recession, space and volume, solidity and weightlessness, mass and line. ‘I create works using colour, instinctive mark-making, complimented with an arrangement of abstracted elements to evoke or capture a moment in time’ he says. Working in mixed media — oil, charcoal and pastels — he creates beautifully balanced compositions that, he says, ‘hopefully add a little beauty to the world’.
Although not directly relating to a scene or place, much of Chris Sims’ work is rooted in the landscape, be it rural or urban. His palette of colours are the colours of nature and the natural world. The attraction to the physical nature of his viewpoint inspires dynamic compositions, utilising mark-making and abstracted shapes, evoking an emotive place. He uses this working process with a view to reaching a point where a balanced composition emerges.
Each of his paintings has a character of its own or, as Chris himself says ‘each painting takes on its own journey. You make a mark and then have to react to it somewhere else, so you’re working your way through it. Even when I work from a sketch, something else happens and it changes’.