Painting my way by Dawn Lim

I call my paintings abstract because they are not copied from anything I can see and are purely made up compositions straight from my imagination. I learnt while reading a surrealist manifesto which I found in my research whilst I was studying at University of Ballarat in Victoria, Australia, that by making marks, maybe in colour or shape, on my support, which could be canvas or paper or whatever I am painting or working on, things begin to form in your mind and you open up a dialogue with your work. You seem to communicate with it and the painting or drawing just kind of magically appears. I absolutely love creating in this way, it gives me the greatest pleasure and even though I can look and put reality, rather well, I felt nothing short of polished realism would satisfy me, and I really do not want to go that way any more.
I now like paint to behave like paint and I like the rough untidy gestural, spontaneous brush strokes and the magic that comes about as I work and struggle to create a composition. In short I have become too impatient to work in realism and like experimenting with shape, color and line. I have heard it said, “You cannot paint from a vacuum,” and for the most part I agree, I have sometimes got something on my mind to start me off, and I know what I want to paint but sometimes the paintings take shape nearly all by themselves. I feel like an outsider watching what takes place and am as surprised as any one else as to what results. This is the case with the four small paintings … thinking man, false prophet, in the beginning and fallen. The reason these four have a continuity is because I painted them all at the same time working one from the other and they just developed. I did not know what I was painting about until I saw them emerge and then I was easily able to title them, at least that was what I saw in them. Piccaso said that his paintings were not always thought out before hand but that they developed as he was creating them and even then they kept on developing even after he had finished with them in the imagination of the viewer. I agree whole heartedly with this sentiment.
Sometimes, I do not see anything specific I can title or name the paintings and can only say I am happy with the composition or colours or ambiance of the paintings. After painting in this way for nearly ten years, I still have a hard time trying to pin myself down to one particular style or result in the painting. Each one is completely different from the last. I feel like I’m still stylistically trying to find myself, although I have learnt that Piccaso had the same struggle. Like him, I have found myself on a cycle of returning to or revisiting the different styles, I have produced in the past and can point to blocks of works of the same types over time, and quite happily find myself following other artists’ progression. I find this interesting as it invokes the reality of collective consciences, which is something I am interested in.
I am not proficiently verbally to describe my paintings, after all I paint and would rather have my paintings speak for themselves, but I hope for anyone liking my work that this basic explanation of how I produce my paintings will help satisfy the need to know about them, and give some insight as to how they are produced.