Albert Irvin‘s encounters with nondual awareness are entirely somatic. His aim is to find a way to make explicit the ineffable human spirit … his subject is the question: how can the INNER experience of being alive be laid on canvas in visual language?
“Can I make a painting about human experience
without having to depict appearances?
Can I paint the human spirit
rather than noses and feet?
Can I reveal the splendours and agonies of life
through space, colour, light, shape, line,
confrontation, rhythm and inflections
in the paint?” asks Irvin.
Source – Paul Moorhouse, Albert Irvin: life to painting
Paul Moorhouse, Tate curator and author of Albert Irvin: life to painting, wrote of Irvin:
Even to those familiar with his work, seeing a new painting by Irvin can be an extraordinary experience akin to discovering a young, energetic artist in the first flush of ambition. Given the force of its restless energy, its freshness and the sense it communicates of an artist in love with his chosen activity, it is even more surprising to realise that this is the work of an artist in his late seventies.’
Source – Royal Academy of Art
albert irvin at the artisans’ gallery