What if consciousness is the only reality? This is a question that used to be asked by religious thinkers. But recently, neuroscientists have started to ask it too. To understand it, think about a clay pot. It's just clay in the shape of a pot. The 'pot' part can't be measured. It doesn't weigh anything. So, in a sense, everything in the universe is clay. It's just stuff. It's all one thing. Only our perception makes it meaningful. Therefore, consciousness is the only reality.
Head-spinning isn't it? Yet, many people feel this 'one-ness' instinctively. Artist Colin Fraser is one of them. After many decades of dedication to his craft, Colin says he no longer differentiates between the various physical components in his compositions. "I honestly have come to feel that, in my paintings, I am actually painting the energy," he says. "The intangibles – the light, the air, the space – are much more interesting to me than the objects themselves."
Colin didn't always feel this way. But he has now reached a new phase in his career. He feels like his mastery of technique and medium (egg tempera) has given him a new freedom. It's blurred the boundary between the artist and the execution of the art. He says: "I am now at the point where ideas and images just come to me, and I accept them. Sometimes I look at the completed work and I think: how the hell did I do that? Where did that come from? But it comes from doing this for 40 years. I now think of all my paintings as part of one long singular process."
Given this, it feels a little prosaic to pick out the individual highlights of another impressive new Colin Fraser show. But this is an exhibition catalogue and we have a job to do! There are so many eye-catching works. Take Flame, for example. In this fantastic piece, The shadows and the lemons shimmer with the sense of light, air and space that Colin is so interested in.
The same can be said of Last Roses and Train. The flowers – picked from the garden of Colin's mother – poignantly express a sense of nature renewing itself. Meanwhile, there are the customary landscape paintings – all suffused with the midsummer Nordic light of the artist's Swedish home.
As ever, these works remind us that Colin is the world's foremost painter in egg tempera. It's a meticulous technique closely associated with early Renaissance painters in which powdered pigment is mixed with egg yolk and water, and applied little by little, layer by layer. But it's worth it. The end result is a luminosity that no other medium can match.
Colin came to egg tempera shortly after moving to Sweden in 1981. He had previously studied at Brighton Polytechnic, and taught art in Worthing. His first egg tempera show in 1990 was a major breakthrough. It kickstarted a successful career that has seen Colin's work exhibited all over the world. His first show at the Catto was in 1992, and he remains one the gallery’s most beloved artists.
