Robert C. Meehan

Freedom of Strictures, 2015

Robert C. Meehan

• Spray Paint on Canvas
• 120 x 90 cm

• Artist Statement

  Freedom is less a story of the free (with respect to modernity) and more a rhetoric of the fatuous limitations we have, by others, set upon us from a young age. No longer are we the followers of the accepted and acceptors of the established. We've snowballed into a stricture, a societal framework as such that we are now, as if by nature, expected to fall comfortably and happily into, through our own volition. What most see & refer to as 'normality' is in actuality, generally a case of commonality the banality and mundanity of the day in day out 'lifestyle' expected of us.

  Through the use of paint, I create multi-faceted works generally characterised primarily by two distinct planes within the overall composition. The first, defined by its expressive use of spray paint and the freedom of form its nature allows. The second, defined by their structured use of line and shape, juxtaposing the aforementioned through this idea of stricture, washes of block colour or literal whitewashes (a nod towards colour field painting) acting as a constriction of expression and its form, subduing the freedom of the works base layer. Through the continual layering and building up of very light, transient washes within the overall composition, a struggle begins to develop between the two, as if both were making attempts to gain dominance over the other. A sense of wanting for the expressivity to come to the fore can be felt, its autonomy married only by the desire for its restriction from the oppositional, commandeering forms. Though abstract in emotionally complex meditations on our own freedom and its reconciling of our imposed strictures. The struggles between the two and the links found therein to modernity and our own social constructs. I’ve made the work as honest as I could.