John Reid

Q1. When you begin a painting what are you hoping to achieve or create? The act of painting for me isn’t so much about a finished product. It’s very much about being in that creative space, where you can dismantle systems and restrictions you’ve set up within yourself and start to trust in one’s own creativity and its possibility. So really painting is about advancing, if you like, one’s creative domain, ones sense of possibility…and what happens when you finish with a work

In the process of resolving a painting, the artist builds an energetic field — a charged platform that both grounds and propels their engagement with the work. This energy accumulates through a series of intuitive exchanges between control and surrender, accident and intention. As the painting evolves, it begins to assert its own presence, developing a rhythm that feels autonomous – a moment when the work feels alive and self-sustaining, as if it is painting itself. The paint

A great painting is not defined by its subject matter—it’s defined by its paint language . What makes a work truly powerful is not what  it shows, but how  it speaks through paint. The medium itself becomes the message: colour, rhythm, surface, and gesture come together to form a visual language that transcends description. When we talk about “paint language,” we’re talking about the artist’s fluency in translating emotion, perception, and experience into the physical reality

The idea of beauty without comfort is central to understanding art that matters. Paintings are not pets. They do not exist to soothe, to...

My work investigates the unexpected opening of space and the sense of wonder that arises in such moments. I am drawn to the chemistry...

To express one’s creative voice, the artist needs to create, or find, an internal playing field, a space where they can function in their...

There’s a violence to pure colour, like an assault. It’s almost a toxicity. It disarms us, …and yet we perceive it as a freedom, an expanding sense of wonder. Our sense of self is very much focused around the pendulous swing between light and shadow. Our sense of light is so often how we perceive it from the shadow …it’s a sense of relief, an attraction, an uplifting of self, something that calls to us. Like beauty, we perceive it from a place of not having. Beauty is a trap.

In June 2022 I started to incorporate the use of texta marker pens and acrylic pens in my work. The main reason for this was to readdress...

I feel very strongly that what needs to happen when viewing a painting is a shift in consciousness, brief as it may be, a new perspective...

Walking through the Matisse: Life and Spirit exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW one can’t help being intoxicated by the continual development and notion of essence in Matisse’s work. By this I mean the essence of the image and subsequent life of the work. What is important and what is not. From his early more traditional works, where paintwork and colour are pushed to represent subject matter, to the sense of infinite space, light and freedom captured in his late cutouts an

I’ve always been obsessed and fascinated by Rothko’s final works on paper. For me these works are absolute perfection. They represent the...

“It’s not about the image. It’s about the wonder of the space you create. As an artist one must move on from Something to look at towards...

The realm of a painting has an interesting irony. A volley A chemistry outside our realm of logic that cancels and negates the notion of...

Art…great art, is so honest because of where it comes from and on some level, we recognise this honesty and we crave it. This is a feeling often not associated with the subject matter or story line and this happens mostly at a subconscious level. I believe this is the point of art…to reconnect us with a sense of honesty and with the space that this generates for our notion of self. It’s like a strange and most welcomed homecoming...a personal and known truth. So much of how w

Art’s role is to expand the conscious mind and awaken awareness so that sensation prevails over thought. One’s view on life and self...

The inspiration for this blog is from an extract from the movie AT ETERNITY’S GATE by Julian Schnabel. Of course, this is a movie and as...

Entry 1 Within the confines of the visible one can find a space, or is invited into a space, that is infinite …where the self is not...

This is a piece I wrote in 2014 on the work of Timothy Cook and yet it still holds true to how I respond to his paintings. The Dutch...

When we think of the placement of a mark such as a brushstroke, it is natural to engage thoughts of where to place and how to place. That...

In May of 2012, after an invitation by the then CEO of Mornington Shire Council, Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpentaria, I spent...