Jay Sykes
It is increasingly common to find contemporary artists whose paths to the world of art are not through tertiary art schools. Sometimes their journey is a repudiation of a narrow way of thinking but it can also be primed by the complexity and beauty of the empirical world. Jay Sykes is one of these artists and this development as an artist is fascinating.
Jay is a young emerging contemporary painter from Nipaluna. With a creative backgound different from most traditional visual artists Jay is grounded in research science. Each abstraction they offers speaks of datasets and analysis combining scientific communication with aesthetic design
These are very different ways of thinking but coincidentally reminiscent of artists at the beginning of abstraction, Hilma af Klint and Jean Arp, both biomorphic abstractionists using amoebal forms to express multivarious and quirky life. In Jay’s work there are line graphs, scatter plots and area charts morphing into whimsical playgrounds and bold mountain landscapes. The colour is bold and the surfaces lush, moving the imagery away from mathematical presentation into confident use of the tools of a painter.
