Charlie Sheard
The artist’s job is to master traditional forms and techniques, in order to maintain and develop the continuum of a living art form. It is only by such means that any artist can hope to create intelligible and meaningful structures, and for innovation to amount to anything more than mere novelty.
Following the lead Kandinsky provides in his seminal essay Concerning the Spiritual in Art, my understanding as a practicing artist is as follows: by developing a language of purely abstract forms, the painter develops a kind of antidote to the extreme materialism of our moment. I have devoted my last five years to developing this type of pure abstraction. Kandinsky has been central to my endeavor, but I have also drawn on Ancient Greek models, Byzantine decorative forms, Northern Gothic idioms and German Romanticism, as well as from developments in nineteenth century Symbolist practice.
- Charlie Sheard, 13 January 2011
