Work from a recent exhibition entitled

MUSIC ON A FLAT PLANE

"There are two elements of this body of work about which visitors might be curious that I can explain quite simply.
First is the title of the show, and the second is that the paintings are identified only by numbers.
The works are paintings not pictures. They are about a quest to find out what the activity of painting might mean for me personally. To try to resolve a debate in my own mind, why one might want to manipulate messy paint in a world where we have access to the digital camera, the video, the computer generated image etc. etc. etc. I might invent titles for a work after it is finished, but then it would immediately take on a literary or illustrative dimension, which for the moment I would rather avoid.
The title of the show, though some of my friends think it is hilarious, does in fact describe as well as I can, what I have tried to do in the work.
Music potentially can function in an entirely abstract way. It may well evoke an emotional response in the listener, the listener may imagine images or events, but the music doesn't do it by, as it were, drawing a picture. I think that we can respond to colours and marks and their relationships to each other within a two dimensional plane in a similar way in which we respond to music. Each painting I see as a unit, an event. My aim is to set out the elements within the flat plane in a way that seems resolved. An identity that needs no alteration to be credible without reference outside itself. This seems to me to be quite parallel with the aims of some composers".
Chris Roskell 2006

Chris Roskell lives in Harlow where he went to school and has worked in his studio at Parndon Mill for several years.
He studied fine art in the sixties and early seventies, a time when the whole validity of painting was hotly debated. Indeed his work towards the end of his time at art school moved away from conventional painting towards performance when he worked with dancers from The London Contemporary Dance. Since then Chris has spent time carrying out specialist decorating commissions on site, using his craft skills as a painter, as well as developing fine art painting in the studio.