Painting the Joy of Being Alive

nPaul Butterworth Artist

 

​My favourite painting is Wheat Field with Cypresses (1889) by Van Gogh.
As I stand before it, the museum disappears and I’m transported to whispering wheat, cawing crows, and the smell of Autumn — no inner voice, just the joy of being alive and the pure feeling born of the senses and shared experiences.

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I aim to achieve the same sense of connectedness using shape and colour, but without figuration, just as music moves us without words. My theme is the joy of being alive.

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Each painting is both intuitive and tightly composed. I work directly onto the canvas without pre-planning, but as the design evolves I create a new set of visual rules for each painting — like a sonnet in poetry. Though my paintings are hard-edged, they are emotional rather than mathematical.

 

I think of them as expressionist works inside a geometric body.