ARTWORKs
"There is no tabula rasa, I have always worked in a way where there is something to begin with". Dale Inglis' singular practice involves building up surfaces with a wide range of materials, including varnish, opaque paint, decorator’s paint, salvaged and recycled drawings and sketches, fabrics and pages torn from books.
Once finished and dried, the surfaces are subjected to a process of destruction using paint remover, a heat gun, a blow torch, scrapers and sandpaper, causing the paint to bubble, curl and shrivel, revealing a palimpsest with tantalising fragments of image and meaning. The surface may be modified further, the process of experiment and improvisation continuing until a final image has been created.
While stemming from landscape experience and incorporating landscape references, Dale Inglis' artworks occupy a unique place in the mainstream of modernist abstract practice, with roots in the work of Turner, Rothko and Tapies. In this way, he finds a meeting of the external world and his own inner experiences, where the underlying feeling is for what the poet T.S. Eliot refers to as 'the timeless moment'.
