Website

http://www.thebasis.org

Relationship status

married

College / University

Central St. Martin's

Program

Fine art

Member type

Artist

If you're an artist, what kind of art do you make?

Conceptual, Digital, Painting, Printmaking

I am...

Here. Are You?

About my artwork

Living and practising in London, Joseph Newton draws on the abstract notions of truth, knowledge and what they bring to a representation in the form of viewers experience of the visual world. The way information is lost in the representation and reformed with our perceptions.
Alongside the abstract is also the concrete. Any form of representation relies on some sort of carrier to perform. Abstraction could be seen as the catabolic destruction of the real in concrete information but which holds the essence of the real by the way of symbolic form. Thus we come to the question of what real means and we find that in reality (!?) it is usually based on conventions formed from experience first as a singleton and then as the conventions of society. This is seen in the way representation has style but is there another visual system that of the carrier of the information, the way the visual system perceives the information in a physical way can be the carrier of the information and the information itself.
The use of flat colours and sharp linear edges in my paintings uses the loss of information from the perceived world to evoke like responses in the abstract representation and to use the averaging of the colours in a perceived scene to find the edge of representation. Texture and shade have been forgone even to the extent that many of the paintings show no obvious method of making. All that exists is the colour. To make the concrete simple has not simplified the meaning indeed the added ambiguity could be said to have added more information and not less, this is the paradox. Even with the textural, con-structural element removed and even with non representational colours, conventions are drawn upon from the viewers experience, sensory experience and knowledge. For instance, most people have a view of abstract art either from what they have seen written about it or from simple sensory response. In the present day this includes the idea of the abstract as itself, not indeed as an abstract at all. If abstract art is it's own language and so is representational art where do they meet where is the edge abstract representationalism or maybe representational minimalism! With all the conflict in the world at present caused by peoples differing world-views and ideas of truth, I began thinking about the idea of an art that any world-view would appreciate irrespective of the cultural background. A universal visual truth to human perception that goes beyond boundaries of conventional truth of any particular culture, a cross-cultural commonality of representation. The use of effects that go beyond cultural boundaries such as illusion, the lack of any certain cultural apparels (or the use of a wide range) and the psychology of perception allow an idea to be non world-view specific. Another way of course is to use the mundane. Abstract art is not completely cross cultural because of style. Depending on the cultural background (even within countries and art movements) it takes a particular style.
The way that computers compress images so that files are within a certain size of information (bits/bytes) yet convey the original because we expect them to look that way because the information is reconstructed by our perception. This is an anabolic gain of information (our perception) after a catabolic loss (computer compression) but because computers work in this way we have learnt to see in that way. The amount of entropy or information lost depends on the observer. The more knowledge of a system an observer holds the less information is needed to represent it. This leads to the use of symbols. The other form of compression a computer uses is more interesting in that the information is transformed to take up less size. Instead of being lost, information is converted via an algorithm to a smaller (in bits and bytes) form and then uses the inverse of the first algorithm to recreate the original. This could be seen as an analogy for perception. Maybe!
Absolutes only seem to exist on a local level and in the world of the computer this local level is worldwide. The conventional truth of the way the computer works married to the conventional truth of how we see computers forms a language that becomes the subject itself. Information.

Artists I like

Marcel Duchamp
Bridget Riley
Victor Vaserely
Roger Broders
Piero della Francesca
Leon Battista Alberti
Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Hieronymus Bosch
Piet Mondrian
Gustav Klimt
Albrecht Durer

Interests

Valves
Cycling
History
The idea of truth
Music

What exhibitions are good at the moment?

Duchamp at Tate

The centre of the artworld is

nowhere and everywhere